


Faerie Fire and Earth Magic

by Born In Captivity- Ineligible to Release (Jashasedai)



Category: Motorcycling RPF, Motorsport RPF, formula 1 - Fandom, motogp - Fandom
Genre: Fantasy, Gypsy, Mages, Magic, Travelling Folk, Wizard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-07-04 04:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 31
Words: 40,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15833562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jashasedai/pseuds/Born%20In%20Captivity-%20Ineligible%20to%20Release
Summary: Completed 11/4/2018For Nico’s twentieth birthday, he received his great-grandmother’s book of spells. He’s been training as a wizard for as long as he can remember: magic runs in his family, and they are well-respected as healers and helpers. The spells in the book mostly seem much too advanced for Nico. His friend lewis taunts him, saying he’ll never be a proper wizard if he keeps playing around with his herbs and spices like some kind of common kitchen witch. Nico tries to not care. He likes his down-to-earth magic.Then one day, a band of travelers come to town, pitching colorful tents and doing tricks for an awed crowd, telling the future in crystal balls and dark tarot cards. Upon learning there are magic healers, the leader of the strangers, a charismatic Italian named Vale, requests a meeting. He needs the help of skilled magic folk with a ritual, he says. A very old ritual. Can he be trusted? Will the ritual really help his people, or does it have a darker purpose?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theianitor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theianitor/gifts).



> This prompt was stolen.
> 
> Since I accidentally wrote this story, I owe the person I stole it from. So here is the story.

The wagon was lit with an eerie glow that came from no source Nico could identify, faerie fire or something of the like, just the sort of thing a man like this would overuse, simple, but impressive to the townsfolk.  He sprawled over the bed in his luxuriously decorated wagon, graced in carefully placed shadow, long fingers rolling a coin over the back of his knuckles. His black boots were heaped casually on the floor beside another, plainer pair of boots.

 “You saw something,” Vale, Valentino, as he called himself for the crowd, had a voice like a snake in high grass, “Something you didn’t understand.”

 “I’ve seen mage works,” Nico said, shifting, trying to get a better view of the man’s face beneath the broad brimmed hat he wore.  It was plumed with a feather he would later hear tell came from a Roc, a bird from the mountains in the east that fed on whole elephants, but he recognized it from one of the bestiaries his family kept as coming from an ostrich, a frightening enough creature, that could run down a man on horseback, but at least something that existed.  “I know most of those tricks you did for the townspeople were just tricks, but at the end…”

 “How do you know they were just tricks?” Vale interrupted.  The coin disappeared from the backs of his fingers, and he sat up abruptly, but somehow the shadow from his hat kept his face hidden.  “The people from the high houses never venture into the town while the travellers are here. There are...agreements.” He eased back into a lounging position, but continued to let his feet hang off the edge of the bed.

 Nico looked at them.  They were bare. Vale had kicked off the boots the moment he stepped up into his little wagon house, nothing else, not his elaborate cape, not the wide, plumed hat, just the boots.

 It was impolite to remove your shoes where others could see, at least in the high houses.  Nico had learned the lesson well. He was...uncomfortable with the sight of this man’s feet.

 All of the travelling folk he had seen went without shoes.  They were poor and shoes were expensive. Children in the village went without shoes in the summer to save the leather for the cold rains of winter, but not adults.

 Never adults.

 His feet weren’t particularly well cared for.  Nico’s own legs were shaved, his feet scrubbed and his toenails carefully trimmed.  He had been taught that grooming, all over, was a sign of a neat mind, and necessary for a high mage.

 This man had little hairs on his toes and, and his feet were clean but heavily calloused, like the hands of the woodsmen who brought the firewood, and the hands of the smith at the forge in the town.

 Nico’s feet were as soft as his hands.  Lewis mocked the little stains he had from working with herbs and brews.  The pen calluses and ink stains that were practically a permanent feature of Lewis’ skin, and of most mages were, on Nico, obscured with blotches of colors, red of ochre and green of emerald’s fern and orange that was never quite as bright and brilliant as the embodiment of fire stones Nico ground for some of his more advanced potions.

 Lewis also mocked Nico for wanting to break the rules and come to the fair put on by the travellers.  Not real magicians, he’d said. Just tricksters, bilking the crowd for money.

 He _had_ seen through the sleight of hand and the smoke and mirrors foolery the travellers had put on, culminating in the appearance on a wagon that folded out into a tiny stage of “The Mysterious Valentino.”

 Until Valentino had done...something, and Nico had smelled a hint of a very familiar herb in the smoke wafting from the simple fireball the traveller held in a hover above his hand, but instead of the usual effect of dizzy vision and a headache, something very strange had happened.

 He had...seen a bright glowing symbol on Valentino’s forehead, and when he had looked around, several of the other travelling folk had symbols as well.

 And without seeing himself, he knew there was a symbol on his own forehead.

 “It doesn’t matter why I came,” He said, “You asked to see me.  You made those...runes appear and then you asked me here. Why? What do they mean?”

 Vale’s hat brim raised, and for the first time, the young high mage in training could see the man’s face, really see it.  He was striking. He had a pointed chin and nose, with curly, deep blonde sideburns, to match the curly hair spilling onto his shoulders like a golden cowl.  He had heavy gold earrings, two in one of his ears and one in the other. He had dusky skin, like all the travelling folk.

 He had violet eyes.

 Maybe it was the reflected faerie fire, but Nico didn’t believe so.  He had eyes the color of the violets that grew on the edges of the cook’s kitchen garden.

 He also had a wicked smile.

 The man’s smugness was off putting to Nico, and yet he wondered what he could know that could make him so confident.  He was a hedge wizard, Nico was sure, now, had been since the show, but the high mages all spoke with deepest contempt of hedge wizards.  They were...well, everything they inferred about travelling folk they inferred about hedge wizards. They were the reason the townsfolk sometimes turned on magic users.  The thieves and the petty caused them to turn on their benevolent protectors.

 Vale, he had introduced himself by his real name when Nico had been brought to the wagon by the big man with the shaved head and the skin too light to be a born traveller, the stories about their stealing children was evidently true, stood off the bed and moved to one of the walls of the wagon.  

 He touched a latch and the face of what had seemed to be a cupboard let down to reveal a desk, with all the needful supplies carefully tucked behind.  He took a slip of paper out of a slot, and inked a pen. He had the calluses along his fingers that meant he spent a great deal of time writing, too.

 He glanced at Nico to be sure he was looking and his hand swooped in a shape, a circle with a line through it and another circle within.  “This is what you saw on my face?”

 Nico nodded.  He hadn’t gotten a clear look, and the hat with the odd shadows should have obscured it, but he knew the symbol drawn felt right.  “Yes. You saw something on me that made you call me here, didn’t you?”

 The older man smiled.  “You are intelligent.”

 He hadn’t expected a word like intelligent from this man.  He hadn’t expected the man would be able to write, except perhaps well enough to make more than a mark for his name.  Nico just nodded. Of course he was intelligent, he was one of the best trained minds in the world, the high mages, and his family, would allow nothing less.  This man couldn’t be expected to know that, of course. He could know nothing of the high mages and their ways.

 He drew another symbol, and Nico felt a shock of recognition.

 It was a leaf, jagged edged like a mint leaf.  He was always finding himself doodling it in the edges of his notebooks and papers.

 “That is what you saw on my face,” He said.  There was even less doubt about this.

 “This is what I see, what all of the mages here see, when we look at you with the catsbane smoke in the air.”

 All the mages?

 How could there be more than one rogue wizard here?  The high mages might have allowed one hedge wizard to run free, where any clear thinking person would believe him an imposter, but ALL?

 He remembered at once the other symbols, and how Vale had said the high mages didn’t come to the fairs by agreement.

 He had stumbled into the midst of a society of hedge wizards.

 “How many of you are there?” He asked, a little breathless from the discovery.

 “Oh, several, several,” Vale directed his attention back to the drawing of the leaf.  “What do you see in this?”

 “It’s a leaf,” He began to categorize it taxonomically.  He knew the categorization by heart, but there was nothing like it in any of the botany archives in any of the libraries he had been allowed to search.

 Vale clucked impatiently.  “Hush, young one, they have bound you well to their strictures.  What do you SEE?”

 Nico looked at the drawing.

 “Healing.”

 He looked up for confirmation he didn’t need.

 Vale nodded.

 Nico looked down at the circle drawing.  “The earth. The spirit.”

 Vale nodded again.

 “You are an earth mage?” Nico felt stunned.  “You can call stones from the ground and command gorges to open and close, and build mountains with a gesture and you...do THIS?”  He gestured and the faerie fire winked out.

 They were plunged into darkness.

 “No.”

 The word came from nothing because Nico could see nothing, and no faerie lights reappeared.

 He summoned them of his own accord.  Faerie lights were one of the first spells a mage child learned, and as easy as telling an A from a B.

 “You...can’t?”  Nico asked.

 Vale took his hat off and set it on the bed.  He was wearing a garish yellow headscarf holding back the waves of blonde curls and he wasn’t meeting Nico’s eye.  “No,” He said, again, quietly. “I cannot even make the faerie lights. One of my brothers must light my wagon for me every night.”

 He couldn’t make faerie lights?  They were so simple.

 “You see, Nico.  This is why I have called you, a born healer to me.  I have lost my magic.”


	2. Chapter 2

“I just have to get some things,” Nico slung the pack onto his back, “I won’t tell anyone your secret.”  He trotted down the steps of the Mysterious Valentino’s wagon in the dawn light the next morning. They had stayed up all night discussing what the hedge wizard knew of why he’d lost his magic, and what he knew of how to restore it.

“Be careful, Nico,” Vale said, voice low, but carrying clearly in the quiet of the morning, “The high mages disdain my people.  They will not approve of you helping me. They will be glad one of us has lost our magic.”

That was a chilling thought, of course no mage could be GLAD another had lost their magic, it would be like being glad someone had lost a foot.  Nico just raised a hand and turned to trot through the quiet camp, past the sleeping village, up the hill to the cluster of disconnected towers where the high mages lived.

There were 7 towers, built in the distant past and maintained since time immemorial by the same 7 families of high mages.  Occasionally someone left to seek his fortune or a mage from another community married in. Thus the ties were strengthened.  Nico’s family had the tallest and grandest tower. Nearly the grandest. The short tower in the center was REALLY the grandest, but it was home to the greatest wizarding family of any in the world, and no one could really compare to THAT, besides, those boys were all much older, and even when they’d all been young together, they were snobby and over proud.

Lewis might mock Nico for his herbcraft, but he’d never thrown any of his potions in the bog, like the older boys.  Lewis was his best friend.

Lewis was a special case.  He was part of Nico’s family, but his people came from the far north, where the spring was fall and the fall was spring.  He’d been very confused by THAT when he’d first arrived. His mother was married to Nico’s father, a beautiful, kind magess who often defended Nico’s plant loving ways to his stoic, but often despairing father.

They had been small children when they had met and learned they were to become brothers, and with Lewis, Nico had explored their home with new eyes.  They had even discovered an old, unused scullery beneath a tangle of rose thorns, and with their family’s permission, had turned it into a workshop of their own.  It was to the workshop Nico went, now.

He didn’t need to go back to his rooms, he wouldn’t need any of the fancy clothing if he was going to be travelling with the hedge wizards.  He wouldn’t need anything but what was waiting in the workshop. He followed the trail through the brush, now widened into a proper trail at his father’s insistence, so he and Lewis would not be forever snagging and ruining those fancy clothes he was now going to be leaving behind.  The sun was just coming up over the hill on the far side of the valley and he could hear the horses in the camp at the bottom of the hill starting to wake. The travelling people would be moving, soon.

He pushed open the door to the workshop.

There were two desks and two walls lined with shelves, on opposite ends of the room.  One with his herbs and cauldrons, and one with Lewis’...boxes.

One of them shook as he walked past it.

Lewis was an animal mage.  He created things. Things like lap dogs nearly the size of ponies.  Cocoa and Roscoe were nowhere in evidence, this morning. The lazy creatures slept on his bed.

The things in the boxes moved in response to Nico’s presence, though.

He felt lost, staring at his wall of bottled herbs.  He could only fit maybe a dozen of the hundreds of carefully harvested, dried and packaged plants and herbs and roots.  He didn’t know which he needed. Should he take rare things like the embodiment of fire he was so fond of? Or should he take common things, banking on the odds that they would be more likely to be in whatever remedy he eventually brewed for Vale’s illness?

He shoved the 12 most useful seeming packages into his pack.  There was still room, but there was something more important than herbs.  He opened a cabinet drawer in what appeared to be thin air, a warded, secret hiding place Lewis had built for him, before he discovered his talent with creatures, when he thought he might be an energy wizard.

The spellbook was inside.

The one his great grandmother had left to him.  It was bound in purple wooden covers and imprinted with burned sigils, in the old way.  The spells inside still danced over the pages, making them impossible to read until he was more adept in magic, but someday, they would still and reveal themselves to him, and he would memorize their knowledge and they would become a part of him, making his magic all the more powerful.

He would add to the book, too.  His own knowledge and his own spells, to share his experience with young mages down through time.

The open doorway darkened.

Two massive shapes bounded through.  He couldn’t say for sure what they would look like, Cocoa and Roscoe changed form every time he saw them.  Lewis was always tinkering with them. Today they were in the form of enormous greyhounds, much taller than the knee high type the horsemen to the south used in packs while hunting deer.  These came up to his ribs. They bounded around him, yipping. Disconcertingly, no matter that they were a dozen times larger than natural dogs, their barks didn’t deepen. They continued to have tiny voices, unless they were in Lewis’ favorite of their forms-

“You’re leaving.”  Where the creatures were, Lewis was bound to be as well.  He leaned on the doorframe with his arms crossed, tall, and beautiful, with dark features and skin.  “Those stories about how they enspell fools and children from villages to go with them, and you’re going to give those stories credence by disappearing with them.  Don’t you think the townsfolk will NOTICE you missing? Things here are on the edge as it is, we can’t have them believing travelling magicians steal children. Can you imagine how it would make us look if one of US, a MAGE, went missing?  They would think we can’t protect them, father says-”

“He’s my father,” Nico interrupted.

This had been a sticking point between them for the last several months.

Ever since Nico had stood up to his father and told him that he was not going to learn to be an energy wizard, that he wanted to be a healer.

Nico’s family were energy wizards back as far as anyone could remember.  Old women in villages were healers. Clerics were healers. Anyone could pass out herbs and tell people to lie down out of the sun, but Nico was one of the smartest, strongest born high mages in their family’s line.

He would be wasted doing something even a mundane could do.

Lewis was strong, too, though, and Lewis was interested in energy magic, AND animal magic.  With that combination he could become a dragon lord, one of the highest of all the mages.

As a healer, Nico was no better than those hedge wizards down in the village.  Homeless and barefoot, not even taught how to groom or to dress themselves with decorum.

Those hedge wizards wanted him to help them, though.

They hadn’t even MET Nico and they believed in him.

More than his own family.

A hand settled on his shoulder.

“If you’re going,” Lewis said, softly, “I’m going with you.”

Nico turned around to look.

“You can’t.  Your studies.”

“If you can, I can.”  He had already turned away, he was casting a spell of holding on the small pouch at his waist and sweeping the contents of entire shelves into it.  He waved a hand and Cocoa and Roscoe vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving behind two metal collars that he picked up and interlocked so they formed one collar that seemed perfect and whole.

“Besides,” Lewis said, taking away Nico’s pack and dumping out the contents.  “How exactly were you planning on getting by with a jar of embodiment of fire, a package of robin’s feathers and...6 jars of mint?”  He cast a spell of holding, one of the spells Nico really wished he could have perfected, on the pack and put everything back in, then started sweeping the contents of Nico’s shelves into the pack as well.

Nico stood in stark amazement and stared.

“Are you going to do something useful like get some gold or are you going to clean your nails while I do all the work?”  Lewis asked, briskly.

“Where am I going to get gold? I can’t go back up to my room, someone will see me,” Nico said.

“Cast a pocket hole in the bottom of your money box and put the other end down here.  It will all drop through,” Lewis said, as if this were the most obvious thing.

It suddenly became apparent why Lewis always had more money for treats at the shops than Nico did.  He did as he was instructed and the contents of his AND Lewis’ money boxes fell out of the air into the open pack.

“Now you’re learning.” Lewis grinned.  “That’s it.” He closed the pack and led the way out the door.

Nico followed him, carefully locking the door behind him, as he always had.

“While we are discussing it,” Lewis said, even though they hadn’t been, “Why are we running away with a travelling show?”


	3. Chapter 3

“No.  Make him go,” Vale said.  He was no longer wearing the garish cape or the plumed hat that cast impossible shadows over his face.  He was wearing a loose, linen shirt, dyed a horrible shade of bright blue, and pants that must have been uncomfortably tight over his long, slim legs, and the yellow silk headscarf.  Without all the frills of the show, he was indistinguishable from all the other men of the travelling show.

He was working alongside two others, sweating in the sun and hitching two piebald horses to a wagon.  There was nothing of magic about him, or any of them, but Nico was sure any mage, even a weak one, could have done these things easily with a few simple spells.

“He can help me.”  Nico said. Even to himself his voice sounded unsteady.  He looked at Lewis, who raised his eyebrows.

“No.  I need a healer, not a…” He peered at Lewis more closely and shook his head, “Whatever he is.”

“We’re a package deal, hedge wizard,” Lewis said, “It’s both of us or I keep him here.”

Nico puffed up with indignation that Lewis thought he could decide where Nico went, but before he could prod his step-brother in the chest and ask him what exactly he thought he was doing, the tall, bald man from the night before stepped across the wagon yoke into Lewis’ space.

“You want to be real careful what you call him,” The tall man said.  He was wearing a shirt and vest in red and blue and a heavily embroidered sash.  Like all the travelling folk, he was bare footed.

“Are you going to have something to say about it?” Lewis asked, voice low.

“Colin!” Vale grabbed the bald man’s arm, and pulled him around to face himself.  “Colin,” He said again, more slowly.

The man’s eyes narrowed and he nodded, cast one more look at Lewis and returned to the horse on the other side of the yoke.  The third man, as dusky skinned as Vale, but thicker and shorter, with black hair, watched silently. He shrugged as Colin passed him, and continued holding the pair of piebald horses.

“Young man,” Vale said, and somehow the words seemed more insulting than hedge wizard could ever be, yet the words themselves were without fault, “I appreciate that you feel protective of your brother,”  No one had told him they were brothers, and Nico, pale skinned and blond, and Lewis, dark skinned and dark eyed, looked like nothing if not men from the far corners of the world, “His safety is of paramount importance to me.”  He looked back and forth between them, “He has told you what I’ve asked of him, and he has agreed. This is more than an agreement between men, it is a pact between two mages. Even with no spells cast, it is unbreakable. It is cast of honor.  Stronger than steel. Stronger than lightning.”

Lewis nodded, “I know that...sir,” It was not an easy thing for him to swallow his pride, “That is why I would never try to talk him out of coming, even though I think what you’re asking him could be incredibly dangerous.  He is my brother, and I value his honor, that is why I’m asking, requesting, passage along with him. Please.”

Vale looked at Nico through this speech.  “You both must be willing to work. With your bodies as well as with your minds.  There is nothing here for those who will not work. What you earn is what you keep, and if you earn nothing, there is no food and no place for you.  We cannot afford the wasteless.” An odd way to put it.

He held his hand out to Lewis.  Nico had already shaken on this last night.

Lewis took it without hesitation.

Vale nodded, He turned and pointed to a wagon.  It was painted green with yellow trim. “That one is yours, for now, until you can afford one of your own.  The horses that go with it are on the picket line. Marc, please show them.”

The dark haired young man, younger even than Nico and Lewis, maybe in his middle teens, all dressed in oranges, came forward with steps like he was dancing as he walked, and went off at a rapid pace through the camp.

“Nico,” Vale called after them as they followed, “Your body and your mind, Nico.  Not your Talent.”

No magic?!  They were to hitch a wagon with NO magic?  What did Vale think they were, mundanes?

He couldn’t turn and argue, though, the boy, Marc was moving through the crowd too quickly and they were going to lose him if they didn’t keep up.  Somehow Nico doubted he would circle back for them, so he hurried.

“These are Colin’s horses,” Marc said.  Even his speech was swift, and he had the sort of odd way of pronouncing his words the traveling folk had.  “They know his wagon, they will pull it.”

“Colin was the big man with the shaved head?” Lewis asked.  “Why is he giving us his horses?”

He hadn’t seemed interested in helping them AT ALL.

“He is not.  He made a bet with Vale,” He pronounced it Vahl-Ah, “That you cannot earn your own wagon before summer.  He will lend you his wagon and his horses, against the belief you will not succeed.”

Lewis was petting and getting to know the horses.  Nico let him do his work. Lewis didn’t need his talent to understand animals, he had made long hours of study.

“Where will he live, if we are in his wagon?”

“He will stay with Vale, if he loses the bet, HE will have to earn the money for a new wagon, and new horses,” Marc seemed delighted by the prospect of the man losing his home, or maybe just at mischief and intrigue in general.

“How long does it take to earn enough money for a wagon?”  Nico asked. He had a bad feeling he didn’t want to ask about the horses.

“For you?  It depends on what your show is.  If you tell fortunes, a few years, if you tumble, a year.  What do you do?” He tilted his head when he asked, curious, but in no doubt they MUST have something to do to draw a crowd to them.

Before Nico could say they didn’t have any kind of show, Lewis interrupted, “We’ve got something great.  You will all have to wait to see it, though. We have to get it straight, now that we are working with the rest of you.  No reason to step on anyone’s toes. By the way, how long will it take for Colin to earn enough for a new wagon?”

“Oh Colin will have enough by summer.”

“Why, what does Colin do?”  Lewis asked, looking up from the horses for the first time.

Marc smiled.  His mouth was large and it made his grin huge.  “Colin breathes fire.”


	4. Chapter 4

Yoking the horses to the wagon was a struggle, to say the least.  Nico and Lewis had saddled horses, but this was a whole different crocodile, as Lewis put it.  Nico remembered a crocodile as being some sort of white bird found in northern lakes, but animals weren’t his strong point.

Marc laughed at their inability, but in the end, his mocking showed them, step by step what they were doing wrong, and thus, showed them what to do.  Once they had their wagon hitched, he said his goodbyes and danced his odd walk down the line of wagons, clambering onto the front of one at the far end.

Their wagon was 3 behind Vale’s, which was in the front, and everyone by now was nearly ready, and busy with last minute work on their own packing and wagons.

“Lewis!” Nico said, once he was sure no one was paying attention to them, “I am not an idiot, I KNOW these are VERY good horses.  How are we ever going to earn enough money to buy even a matched pair of nags by summer?? I have enough gold for a fine greyhound, maybe, and you have only a little more, and we have to eat and we can’t go about in these clothes.”

Lewis patted the brown horse’s nose.  Both horses were brown but one had a black nose and feet and the other was all brown.  “Nico, you are worried we won’t have a show?”

“I can’t tumble, or tell fortunes, and unless you have some personal problems you haven’t been telling me about, you can’t breathe fire.  Without our talents, what will we DO?” Nico climbed up on to the wagon and took up the reins.

Ahead of them, Vale was standing on his wagon seat, giving the order to move out.  The man Colin walked beside Vale’s wagon as the mage leader sat and flicked his reins.

Lewis swung himself up into the wagon seat.  “You remember when I broke my arm two years ago?” He asked, with a smile that did not match the words.

Nico’s eyes widened in remembered horror.  “No..Lewis...No..You could have DIED. I could have died.  We both lived and our father nearly KILLED us.”

“Our father,” Lewis hung on the word like he was cherishing it, “Did not kill us, and we would have been fine if that rabbit hadn’t jumped out and scared the horses.”

“And what are we going to DO for horses?  I didn’t bring mine, did you bring yours?”  They had nice little ponies, safe and snug in the stable beside the tower.  Nico flicked the reins and the fine, brown, borrowed horses began to trot, jostling the wagon forward until they found their pace, step in step with each other, as smooth as butter.

Lewis smiled at them.

“No!  They aren’t ours.  He’s lending them to us.”

“For a bet against us.  I don’t think he’ll mind.  It’s not like the _horses_ nearly died.”  Lewis’ smile was challenging, and Nico could never turn down one of his brothers’ challenges.  “Unless you’re too afraid to try trick riding again?”


	5. Chapter 5

That night they camped in the midst of the woods to the east of the town.  They wouldn’t reach another town for two days. Marc arrived at their wagon when they stopped to cajole them into admitting they weren’t ignorant of starting fires without using their talents.  In the end he started it for them.

“Not everyone in your group has the talent, do they?” Nico asked him.

Marc shook his head, “Of course not.”

“Don’t the mundanes turn on you?  They’re jealous, aren’t they?” Lewis asked.

Marc shook his head, “What do they have to be jealous of?  The talent is a lot of extra work. I am tired every night from my chores, and then instead of playing my flute or dancing with the girls or racing my horse with the other boys, I practice.”

“What kind of mage are you?” Nico asked.

Marc grinned and looked down at the fire.

“Then why didn’t you start the fire with your talent, instead of with that flint and tinder?”  Nico asked.

“We are just ordinary people.  There is no reason to waste our power on things like this.”

It wasn’t as though there was a limited supply of magic.  No matter how much you used, there was always more. What could be construed as a waste?

“Vale had his wagon lit with faerie fire when we were in the town, but now he is using a lantern like everyone else.  Why?” They could see the flickering orange light through the waxed paper window of Vale’s wagon door. Faerie fire was a steady glow, and an almost purple shade.

“In town is different.  He has to make people think his magic isn’t real, so they won’t suspect him of being a mage.”  Marc pulled some little sewn bags of sand out of his pocket and started to juggle them absently.  Nico had noticed a lot of the travelling folk had little talents like that. Even if that wasn’t part of their show, Marc was part of a dancing and tumbling group, they knew parts of each other’s shows, and sometimes filled in.

“So they _won’t_ think it’s real?” Lewis asked.  “Doesn’t the cape and the big hat and the magic tricks sort of spoil that?”

Marc looked at him out of the corner of his eye.  “No?” He caught the 3 bags in one hand and quickly threw them high in the air, catching them one at a time in the other and starting his loop again.  “People are smarter than you mages give them credit for. When they see a man with a cap and smoke and flashes, they think, this is a man trying to pull a trick.  I will watch carefully and I will catch him at it, and if they don’t, they think, this has been a fine trick the man has done well. He does a good job. They don’t believe he is doing REAL magic.  If he was doing real magic, he would not need the smoke and the flashes and the cape. They think, If I were a real magician, I would not tell anyone, and I would have the advantage over others. He gives a show because no one expects a man playing a trick to be telling the truth.”

Nico was looking at Lewis.

How had Lewis known about the cape and the hat if he only seen Vale this morning, when he had been wearing neither?

How would he know, unless he, to had snuck down to the show last night?

“He’s in disguise when he’s on stage,” Lewis said with a nod, “But he did real magic, too.  How would all those people explain away all those glowing symbols on all your foreheads?”

“What was that, anyway?” Nico asked, “I recognized the smell of catsbane, but I’ve never seen an application like THAT before.”

“The people could not see the glow.  Only magesight can see it. To them, the fireball was the trick.”  Marc’s loop got more elaborate, each bag following a slightly different arc.

“And how did he do it if he has lost his magic?” Lewis asked, like he’d caught Marc out in a lie.

“Catsbane, prepared in a special way reveals mages to magesight,” Marc said.

“But what about the fireball?”

“It can be done with a wire and a glass ball dipped in lamp oil,” He said, casually.

“But it wasn’t,” Nico said.  “And if Vale has lost his magic, then he really is just doing a trick.”

Marc caught the bags in his hand again and put them back in his pocket.  “No, it wasn’t. And Vale isn’t the one doing the magic. Come on, I will take you to Vale.  He thinks it is time you two met Dani.”


	6. Chapter 6

Their wagon was on the south end of the ring of wagons.  The land rose slightly here and they passed to the central fire up a slope.  The travelling band was a large one, perhaps a hundred folk, men, women and children.

The main body of the camp was gathered around the fire, cooking meals for their own small families.  Vale was lounging on the ground with his back against a fallen tree, too old and rotten for firewood.  The tall man, Colin was sitting beside him, strumming idly on a bittern, laughing at Vale’s loud, joking banter.

The men and women cooking were listening, laughing and joining in the banter.

Vale’s eyes fell on Marc, leading the two older boys, and he grew quiet.  

Colin’s bittern playing went from casual strumming to a more lively tune.  “Marc, bring that flute of yours over here,” He called, though nothing in his bearing had given indication he knew they were there.

Vale stood and pulled a yellow cape that matched his head scarf around his shoulders.  Nico and Lewis made their way around the outer rim of the lighted circle and walked north with him, between two wagons.

Nico’s night vision was ruined by the firelight and he had to trust to following Vale’s footsteps until his eyes adjusted.

The starlight gradually brightened as they walked over the marshy ground away from the camp beside the road.  He saw the bright white of moonflowers and smelled the scent of night blooming jasmine as they walked. The trees thinned as the ground became too soggy, and fallen logs, lay half submerged in the very earth, as though at some point it had been too soft to hold them on its surface.

High squeaking sounds came from what Nico thought must be night birds and maybe some mice.  Something dark, a hawk or a crow? Drifted over the face of the moon.

Then in the dark loomed a half fallen tree, draped in white flowers. At the top of a lone branch, rising higher than a house over the hillocks perched a dark shape.

It elongated like it was slowly dripping from the height, and Nico realized it was a man who had been crouched on the limb and had let himself down, dangling by one hand and dropping to the soft ground with a squelch.  

Dani was wearing yellows and oranges.  Nico recognizes him as part of Marc’s tumbling troop.  A 5 meter drop into a soft surface would prove no problem to an experienced acrobat.  The show they had performed for the Faire had been themselves and 3 or 4 other men, all small and lithe, leaping over and around each other, flinging each other into the air, turning flips, and swinging and spinning in dizzying patterns like squirrels fighting in the trees.  They looked like squirrels, in their orange garb, like the chattering little red squirrels that lived in the nut trees outside Nico and Lewis' bedroom windows at the tower. Those were animals Nico knew. He had spent hours watching the little creatures outside the window above his writing table, when he had been supposed to be studying the fine magics.

Maybe Dani was an animal Mage, like Lewis.

When he came to meet them, a broad smile on his plain but pleasant face, Nico realised he was much smaller than he had assumed at first.  Vale was a tall man, but Dani came up to less than Nico’s shoulders.

“We will talk, come sit down,” His voice was deep, but supremely gentle.  He waved them over to the trunk of the fallen tree. Vale and Nico sat on it, Lewis remained standing, with his arms crossed.  Dani climbed onto it, resting his back against the rising bough and crossing his arms as well.

Nico waited for someone to speak.  Vale intended them to meet this man.  What did he intend them to share?

“Perhaps it will be easier to get to know each other if we can see one another’s faces,” Dani said.  From him spread light. Faerie fire sparked in the heart of each of the tiny moonflowers on the vines choking the fallen tree.

It was as light as day.  Lining the inside of a wagon was a simple feat, but this spoke of range and control beyond anything someone as young seeming as Dani should have been able to manage.  He seemed of an age with Nico and Lewis.

“I have tried to help Vale, but this is beyond my ability as a healer,” Dani said, touching Vale’s shoulder and offering a comforting smile.

“What sort of malady is this?  I have never heard of a mage losing their magic,” Lewis said.

“It has been known to happen, but very rarely, and for different reasons in each of the cases,” Nico said, hesitantly.  If a mage like Dani could offer no help, it must surely be beyond Nico. “Of the Seven mages I know of who lost their power, three of the mages had to endure long journeys and difficult challenges before their magic returned.”

Vale and Dani were watching his explanation, but it was mostly for Lewis.

“And the other four?” Lewis asked.

The hedge mages lowered their eyes.

“Two died on their quests and the others never regained their magic at all,” Nico said.

“I will not be the fifth,” Vale said.

“You told me you didn’t know what caused your magic to vanish, that you woke up and it was gone.  What sorts of remedies have you tried? Dani, you are overseeing his care?” Nico took a book of bound pages out of his bag and in the faerie light of the flowers, began to make notes, ready now to treat this challenge with the decorum and care of a true healer.


	7. Chapter 7

They walked back in the quiet hum of the starlit night towards the camp.  Nico’s questions weren’t fully answered, and his curiosity wasn’t yet sated, it still burned, though the fire in dancing over the petals of the flowers had faded.  Dani insisted they return to the others, and as they walked, Nico felt his belly croaking like a frog. He saw Lewis glance over at him with a grin as they walked ahead of the older two men.

“You’d have asked him questions all night, and gone on to ask more once you’d solved it.  You’re still mortal, Nico, you need food and rest.” Lewis’ stomach growled and he laughed, “And so do I, besides, some of those girls looked very much like they’d like to dance with a handsome student mage, and who are we to deny them that opportunity?”  The sound of flutes and the soft pounding of drums was reaching them, now.

Vale snorted behind them.  He and Dani had been walking in their own quiet conversation, but clearly, they were listening too.  “If you can melt their hearts in a dance, they might spare some time for you,” He said. “If you can melt their hearts.”

The wagons were silhouetted against the fire in the center of the camp.  The cooking and eating was done, and the music and dancing had begun. Dancing shapes passed between the men and the light of the fire, and they passed back between the two wagons into a glorious whirl of color.

After the dim night, the bright wagons seemed to glow and the folk in their bright clothes, dancing, seemed strange birds flying round and round.  Nico saw Marc and his flute, Colin and his bittern, and some other young men dressed in shades louder than their singing and a woman in layers of teal and scarlet and deep yellow skirts playing a drum.

“Dani!” Cried a woman, young and round cheeked, with a mane of dark hair and a golden orange blouse cut so low Nico had to look away.  She took the man’s hands and danced him away around the edge of the fire.

Another woman approached, She had a tin plate of stew and a mug, and she pressed them into Vale’s hands, “We saved some dinner for your friends, lovey, have them eat before the girls scoop them up to dance,”  She was a bit older than he and she kissed him on the cheek, looking Lewis up and down with an appreciative air. “You two do dance, don’t you?” She asked.

Lewis smiled, “Of course.  It’s one of our best traits.”

She guffawed, and an older man with some grizzle in his beard came up behind her and whispered in her ear. “Oh Mick!” She laughed, and they danced away into the crowd as well.

Dani danced back by them, with a different girl in his arms.  As he passed he swung her into the air and caught her as if she was as light as one of the birds she resembled.  Then they were past, around the corner of the fire again.

Vale handed the food to Nico, and the mug with the sharp smelling beer.  “I will show you where to find plates.” He led them along the edge of the wagons, against the flow of the dance, towards a bright blue wagon.  The door was open and he led them up the steps. It was empty inside, but it was a larger wagon than either the one Nico had been in where Vale lived, or the one Colin had...lent to he and Lewis.  The bed was wider, clearly intended for a couple, and there was a little cradle hanging from the ceiling.

“Mama Taru won’t mind you using her plates, for tonight, but remember to bring your own plate and cup and spoon.  You have knives of course?” He asked. They nodded, even high mages carried the workaday knives on their belts. “When you are settled you cook for yourselves, no? Until you learn, Mama will cook for you, as a favor to me.”

“Your mother is the lady who wanted to know if we dance?” Lewis asked.  He was looking at the plate in Nico’s hand. Nico was hoping he would be allowed to eat some, soon.  It smelled heavy with spices, and the beer would not go amiss, either. 

Vale got another plate from the cupboard and handed it to Lewis.  He nodded at the kettle of stew on top of the little cast iron stove.  There was a fire inside just enough to keep the food warm. Lewis lifted the lid and scraped a portion of hot stew onto the plate.

“She is Mama, not my mother,” He corrected.  He opened a drawer and took out two spoons. He handed one to each of them.  “This caravan is her family. She is the matriarch and she is the leader of our circle.”  He got a second cup out of the cupboard and indicated a little beer cask. Some sound outside, or some change in the music caught his attention and he listened for a moment.  “Help yourself,” He told Lewis.

Lewis was spooning stew into his mouth like he hadn’t been raised in one of the best households in the land.  He smiled and nodded.

“What kind of mage is she?” Nico asked.  He was fascinated by this new aspect of talent, learning everyone’s aptitudes as easily as the hedge wizards had proven able to.

“That you must ask her, and you must excuse me, I have matters to see to,” He started down the steps and then turned.  “There is a waterskin there,” He pointed to a sealed deer hide bag with a stopper at one end, “Washing dishes does not wait until you are settled in.”

Then he continued down the steps and around the side of the wagon.

Nico set right to eating.  The stew was delicious. He would have liked some bread, but none had been offered.  The beer was not cold, but it was still sparkling with foam, and it tasted delicious.  He was full and satisfied, and he sat with Lewis at the tiny table in the big wagon and thought dreamily about how much his life had changed for the better.

“Do you remember the legend,” Lewis said, staring into his plate like he wished more stew would appear on it, “Where the boy traveled to the land of the elves and then couldn’t leave because he accepted their hospitality?”

Of course.  Nico knew all the legends from the books in the library.  He looked at Lewis with a disbelieving expression. “Yes, he stayed for a thousand years and gradually he turned into a forest boulder, and then they returned him to his family but he could never tell them what happened or return to his original form.”

“It was because by accepting, he entered into some sort of agreement with them that he didn’t understand, and he had to fulfill his part before he could leave,” Lewis said.

Nico looked into his own empty plate.

The tune of the music changed to a slower pace, and the laughing quieted and more voices raised in the words of an old love song.

“They aren’t elves.”  It shouldn’t have needed saying, but somehow, with the music and the lighting of the flower bog, and the sharp contrast between the quiet of the wagon and the raucous sound from outside, everything felt distant, and it did need saying.

Saying it broke the odd mood.

Lewis laughed.  “Of course, I’m just,” He grinned, “Joking around.”

“Niiico!” Called a now familiar young man’s voice.  “Looooouis! Come out! I have some friends for you to meet.  They will not be embarrassed that you do not know how to hitch a wagon or start a fire.”

“They do not?” Asked a heavily accented girl’s voice.

“Tatiana, I am sure you and Maria will be able to teach them to make fires,” Marc joked lasciviously.

Nico and Lewis looked at each other and rushed to stand, “We’ll be right out!” Nico called back.  They raced to wash their plates and spoons, and Lewis drained the last of his beer and started to rinse the mug as well.

“No,” Nico said, “You will need something to drink for the rest of the night.”

Lewis cast around for the beer cask.  “It’s alright,” He said, “This way I’ll have an excuse to ask her to show me where to find a drink and a quiet place to drink it,” He snatched up the mug.

“Good plan.”  Nico swallowed the last of his beer, as well.  They both straightened their hair and stepped out of the wagon as proudly as possible.  Marc was standing with two truly gorgeous girls, one on either side of him. They both smiled when the two newcomers stepped out of the wagon.

They took their hands and showed them the steps of the traveler's dance.


	8. Chapter 8

“The next town is only two days away.  Vale and the others have been letting our debt slide because there has been nowhere to get things for ourselves, but you know they’re remembering.  We don’t have enough money to make it to the next village, if we don’t make at least 30 crowns here,” Lewis was standing in the middle of the field where they were stopped while the wheelwright fixed a broken axle on one of the wagons.

They were climbing the hills to reach the next town, in the little river valley beyond.  Nico had been fretting about what they were going to actually DO when they arrived. He had never put on a display of anything other than performing magic tasks for his teachers before he was able to move on to the next lessons, and almost universally, the ability to complete a spell indicated the readiness to use it.

If you weren’t ready to use a spell, if it was performed incorrectly, nothing at all happened.  It wasn’t like the village people’s lore went, where a mis performed spell cast untold woe across the inhabitants of a region.

Trick riding was not like that, it could go very wrong.

Or it could go embarrassingly wrong.

He wasn’t sure which would be worse, a major injury, or the travelling hedge wizards laughing at the high mages and their inability to do mundane things with no use of their talents.

To that end, they had crossed a copse of beech trees, up into the grassy saddle of a little hill, out of sight of the wagons, to give themselves some privacy while they worked out their act.

The two horses were standing on either side of Lewis, looking at Nico with every bit as much judgement in their big marble eyes as the man holding their halters.

“I don’t want to trick ride.  We don’t know these horses. We don’t know how much space there will be in this town, what if there is no room?”  He planted his hands on his hips.

Lewis imitated his stance.  “Look, I know you were never very confident, but you can do this.  The horses spooked. We’ll make sure wherever we ride has had all the birds and rabbits flushed out of the grass.  And there will be a big crowd, that will keep any animals from startling them.”

“Crowds can spook horses worse than rabbits, sometimes.”  Nico frowned. He just wanted to find another way.

He patted the horses fondly, “These fellows are much braver than our timid little ponies at home, anyway, I’m sure they won’t startle for anything.  We were getting good before we stopped, and now we’ll get even more practice, and we won’t have to worry about getting caught by father.”

“We stopped because you fell off my shoulders at a dead gallop.”

“That wasn’t your fault.  And if anything happens this time, I’ll catch myself with my talent and make it look like an intentional part of the trick.  That will make the crowd go wild. You don’t have to worry about screwing up this time.”

“I don’t have to…” Nico’s nostrils flared.  He stalked forward and snatched the brown horse’s reins out of Lewis’ hands.  Putting one hand on the horse’s shoulder he vaulted onto it’s back. He kicked it into a canter.

He rode in an easy circle until he was certain he was familiar with the animal’s stride, right hind leg striking the ground, then the left hind and right front on the same beat and finally the left front.  In time with the smooth motion, controlling the horse with the pressure of his legs he leaned down low over the animals’ right side.

The animal had no saddle, just a wide leather strap around it’s belly, to which Lewis had attached various loops.

Nico hooked his fingers on the strap, firmly enough to support his whole weight and swung his left leg off the back of the horse, so he was holding himself horizontal beside the body of the horse.  Slowly he reached with his other hand between his legs to the strap in the middle of the belt’s side.

The horse was uncertain, unused to riders doing such odd things, but Nico clucked at it and released the new hold to reassure the horse.  It continued running in a wide circle and he grabbed the loop between his legs, shifting himself until his legs were in the air and he was hanging by nothing but his grip on the loop.

He could see the ground flashing past.  Hanging upside down from the side of the horse like this, his head was only a span from the ground.   A misplaced hoof or an upthrust rock, unseen in the yellowing grass, could knock him loose and under the half-tonne animal’s hooves.

His heart was pounding, but he concentrated on carefully pulling himself back up into the saddle.  He patted the horse’s flank. It was marvelously trained, responding to the barest push of his legs, and he rode past Lewis.

“I’m not the one who fell,” Nico called to his brother, “It’s not me I’m worried about!”

He held his hand out.

Lewis caught it.

Expecting the pressure, Nico was braced for it.  He pulled and Lewis swung up into the saddle behind him.

“It won’t happen again,” Lewis said, quiet against the pounding of hooves, but so close to his ear there was no question of misunderstanding.

The second horse had started to run alongside when Lewis had dropped it’s reins, nickering and playing with it’s teammate.  They ran like the pulled, step for step, just alike.

They rode, with the high mountains shining like iron under the crisp, racing clouds, as fast as the swallows that darted like tiny arrows through the blue clear sky.  The birds called and swooped over the grassy meadow, and everything else was still, and they felt themselves alone.

Two brothers where no man had ever walked, in a world where they themselves were the only ones who had ever been.

“Up?” Nico asked.

In response, Lewis just hooked his feet in the loops at either side of the horse and slowly raised himself until he was standing in the loops.

Standing on a running horse.

He touched Nico’s back, lightly.  There was a great deal of jostling and rising and falling in even a smooth horse’s run, and the two moved with the animal and with each other, compensating so they weren’t rattled about.  Lewis shifted his weight to his left foot and then, with only slightly more pressure of his fingertip touch on Nico’s back for balance, lifted his right foot onto the horse’s back.

The horse didn’t like this.

It nickered and Nico could see it’s eyes moving to look as far back as it could.  He kept confident pressure on it and clicked his tongue again.

It had slowed, but that was fine.  This was a dangerous enough trick without the horse feeling unsure of what was happening behind its head.

When it had settled again, Lewis brought his left foot up onto it’s back.

They rode, Lewis behind Nico, arms outstretched to either side, standing on the cantering horse’s back, and Nico riding in a more conventional position.

Then Nico hooked his feet in the straps and started to raise himself.

The horse must have become accustomed to the strange habits of it’s new riders, because it allowed this with no further slowing.

Nico’s control of the horse was only by the reins if he took his legs from it’s sides, and he wasn’t sure enough, yet, of the horse, and of their own fitness to try standing on the horse’s back as well while it ran.  He and Lewis hadn’t done these tricks for years, and they were very intensely demanding, physically. He stood in the straps, just a bit below Lewis, for a full circle, and then dropped back into a usual riding posture.  Lewis let himself down as well, and they slowed the horse to a stop.

Slow clapping broke out from the edge of the copse that obscured the field from the view of the wagons.

“Brava!” Marc called.  Somehow, despite being down in the dirt helping the wheelwright fix Dani’s wagon, his cape and clothes still sparkled orange like the mages’ paintpen flowers scattered on the upper slopes.  His smile was equally bright, even from this distance. “Bellissimo! A wonderful show! The brothers of the sun and moon. We will find you capes, one black, one white, and people will speak of you all across the land,” He said, confident in his prediction, striding across the field to them and patting the horse on the nose.  “I have never seen such riding. Masters, indeed.”

Nico was puffing and out of breath.  It really had been hard work.

“Well, Marc,” Lewis asked, taking deep controlled breaths as well, and holding his side against the unaccustomed effort, “Do you think we’ll be able to earn enough for our own wagon?”

Marc looked up at them, towering over him from the horse’s back, patted the horse again and laughed.  “Oh assuredly,” He stroked the other horse’s nose as it approached him, wanting to be involved in the company, “When Colin sees you, he will swallow his fire,” He made a gulping sound, “And breathe only a trickle of steam.”  He gasped out a breath. The image pleased him and he laughed again. “Yes, it will make a fine show for you. Perhaps we will even find you some black and white horses.”

Lewis leaned down from the saddle with a wicked grin.  “Black and white horses. Like Vale’s piebalds? You said he likes to gamble.  Do you think we could get Vale to take a bet against our show making more money than, say...Colin’s?”

Marc’s grin widened.  “It is the very thing that I am thinking.”

Their happy laughter rang like a struck bell against the iron hillsides.


	9. Chapter 9

The village beyond the mountain pass was called Haydale.  There was a copse of beach trees on one side, and the fields were golden with the hay of the town’s namesake.  The farm folk had built neat walls and cottages with the stones that worked their way to the surfaces of the fields year by year.  An inn looked to have originally been a stone barn, and then extended with wooden walls, until it had doubled in size. A sign above it read, in whitewash lettering, The Grey Gander.

The caravan passed through the town, an advertisement of sorts of the spectacle they would offer.  As they neared the town walls, Nico had seen Colin take the reins of the wagon, and Valentino climb onto the roof of his wagon.  Nico expected some sort of showy display, but Valentino simply planted his hands on his hips, his broad brimmed hat pulled low and his cape fluttering in a wind that seemed to only touch him.

Nico looked back along the line of wagons where Marc’s younger brother was riding beside him, concentrating very hard on Vale’s cloak.  He was too far away, but he was certain if he was closer, he would see his lips moving as he bespelled the cape to flutter.

Children shouted in delight and trotted alongside the wagons.  Vale had ordered the caravan move at more than their usual walking pace.  Some of the adults frowned as they passed, and as they reached the far end of the village, a man came out from the smithy and herded the children away from the wagons.  “Get back to yer mothers, ya hear, we won’t have ya disappearing with them witchy folk.” Growled the big shouldered man.

He wasn’t alone in his distrustful glances, but he was in the minority.  Before they’d even stopped long enough to unharness their horses, village women, in dark skirts and white shirts, with beautifully embroidered bonnets and scarves had come, carrying pots and pans, with leather purses jingling with the small coins of the realm.  Some few of them shyly asked Nico if he could mend her pots, or if he had any ribbon for her to buy.

He blushed at the wide eyed admiration he saw when they looked at his strange golden hair, or his bright blue eyes.  Lewis came up behind him and patted him on the shoulder. Their eyes became even wider when they saw Lewis’ dark, handsome features.  “You will have to see Mama Taru and Baba Mick for that,” He pointed to the blue wagon. “He is the best potsmith, and she weaves ribbons you would believe had grown and been plucked in the loveliest garden. And yet, they don’t compare to your eyes,” He told one woman old enough to be his mother, “The shine of your hair puts them to shame,” He told another woman, with a 5 year old clinging to her apron.

“What do you do?” Asked the child.

Nico smiled.  “Well, you will just have to come tonight and see.  Simply look for these fine fellows,” Nico patted the horses they were watering at the picket line.  “You will know you’ve found us.”

The mother led the child away, smiling secretively and twirling a lock of her chestnut hair that had come loose of her scarf.

“There he is!” Called another child, this one older, maybe 12.  He and a group of similar aged boys and girls dashed over to one of the travelers.  “The Whistle Man!”

Nico watched the grumpiest of the band turn from unloading the stage wagon and look over the double handful of children.

Jorge pursed his lips and stared at them.  He had a dark goatee and a thick, heavily waxed mustache that was curled at the ends.  He was wearing a red coat the color of blood, and trousers as blue and cold as the sea in winter.  “Why do you come to bother me?” He growled.

All the children but the boy in the lead took a step back.  The boy held up a white lump.

The traveler continued to stare at him, but gradually his eyes dropped to the lump.  He pulled an arrangement of string and sticks and metal discs out of a bag at his side.  “Hold this,” He growled at the boy, unraveling the arrangement and hanging the boy the set of scales by the string handle.  He put the lump on one side and quickly added measured weights to the other, until the balance struck.

He nodded.  He set the lump of salt on the barrel that would become one leg of the stage and produced three pouches of shiny cylinders, from his bag.  The rest of the children crowded close. From the largest bag, the red one, he produced a whistle with 3 holes and set it on the scale. It weighed a little less than the lump, and he broke off a bit of the lump, until the difference was removed and the weights were equal, and returned the small bit of the lump, and gave the whistle to the child.

The child lit up, immediately put the whistle in his mouth, and began to make a high, screeching tone with the whistle.  He pushed the scales into the next child’s hand and the procedure repeated.

“What does he trade for?” Nico asked.

“Salt,” Answered Colin.

Jorge didn’t look grumpy, now.  He was still grimacing fiercely, but his eyebrows went up when each child made their trade, and he several times nudged the scales, without the child’s noticing, in favor of a larger whistle than the lump actually deserved.

“Salt, weight for weight with whistles?”

Colin nodded, “All men need salt.  A single whistle will keep a few of our folk supplied for a week.”

“Jorge cannot afford his own wagon.  Ought he be trading for coin?” Lewis asked.

Colin looked at Lewis curiously.  He glanced down the row of wagons where Dani was helping to set up a table and wares for one of the girls he’d danced with the night before.  He looked back at Jorge. Then at Lewis, with the curious expression on his face again. He shook his head. “All men need salt.” He said.

Then he walked away, laughing like the joke was worthy of a master bard.

Nico had expected the setup would happen, and then as evening fell, the shows would begin.  Instead, the village crowded around while the travelling folk set up. The folk took turns distracting the villagers’ attentions while all the work got done, and as various ones finished their chores, they joined in the entertainment, until gradually, the carnival atmosphere of the travelling folks’ show had spread to the entire village.

Lewis and Nico went to an open field with their horses, and the brilliantly coloured clothing Tatiana had sewn for them, and Lewis called for attention.

They performed the tricks they had practiced, pausing between tricks to gather coins from the villagers.  Lewis had advised that they reward generosity with intricate tricks, and they learned quickly that starting with a few coins in the hat they used for collecting, drew more coins for company.

It was almost like magic.

They had to rest the horses throughout the day, and while the horses rested, Nico and Lewis worked as stage hands.  The musicians took turns on the stage as their other acts ebbed, and Nico noticed that Colin worked on the stage most of the day, playing his bittern, and occasionally a big, foreign looking drum.

“I thought he was a fire breather,” Lewis said, as they passed in front of the crowd gathering the coins.

Nico just shrugged.

As evening fell, a song ended and Colin stood to address the crowd.  The other musicians hopped down off the stage, and the man spoke. He looked striking, in his brightly coloured clothing and his shaved head.  

He told a story of an elf that had turned itself into a dark dragon, and set siege to a village, because it had heard maidens were offered to dragons, and it wanted one for itself.  

He told how a brave young man had taken an enchanted sword and gone to conquer the dragon.  

Colin took one of the torches that had been lit and placed around the stage as darkness fell, using it as a prop to tell how the man had groped through the dark forest and mountains and caves.

“Thus as the man reached forward a trembling hand,” His voice had taken on a strained tone.  He was sweating in the heat of the torch and from the effort of playing the dance tunes that had been called for one after another before the music had ended.  He took a drink from a flask at his hip.

Flame blossomed from his lips.  A great gout of it. “The dragon!  The might beast burst through the entrance of the cavern.  It was behind the brave lad. It’s body as a lizard, larger than a barn, it’s great wings, longer than a country road.  It spurted flame!” He blew fire again.

Nico’s jaw had dropped.

Lewis pinched him.  “I thought the bottle held pure spirits.”  He hissed. “I did not expect he would truly BREATHE flames!”

On the stage, Colin took another drink of the water from his flask, and breathed out a smoke ring.  In the story, the dragon settled onto its haunches to taunt it’s doomed victim.


	10. Chapter 10

Of course, the dragon didn’t win.  The man forced it to turn back into an elf, and while it tricked him to return to it’s realm with it, and then made an effort to trap him, he eventually escaped and returned to his family, where he discovered his sons grown with families of their own, which of course was a great delight to him.  A typical children’s story.

After a mysterious warning, and a last, magnificent gout of flame, the lights dimmed and Colin disappeared from the stage through a previously un-utilized flap in the backdrop, and when the audience’s night vision returned after the sudden burst of light, a tall, blade thin figure, draped all in black was standing on the stage.

The lights in the torches winked out and were seamlessly replaced with purple faerie fire.

The figure raised it’s broad brimmed hat, and sang in dulcet tones, a haunting melody, about a lost waif, and a dusky traveler who didn’t warrant his trust.

His violet eyes were enhanced by makeup, and they seemed visible even to those in the back.  The Mysterious Valentino invited up one of the prettier travelling women, whom Nico hadn’t met by name, and made her appear to float.  He plucked a dove from her hair and released it to flutter over the crowd. From Nico’s vantage point, he could see it flew in a wide circle to settle right back on the wicker basket on Vale’s wagon that was it’s home.  He produced a second dove from within his hand.

The audience was expected to believe it was the same dove, but Nico could see that few of them did.  It was incredible how, by allowing the villagers to see through some of the tricks, or at least, let them believe they did, that they overlooked the feats of actual magecraft being performed onstage.

Though that was an illusion as well.

Nico and Lewis stood beside Dani, half behind a wagon, and watched him whisper and twitch his hands and generally make Vale look a somewhat competent trickster to the ground, and a very adept mage to any who could sense the magic happening on the stage.

Finally the part of the show Nico had been waiting for came.  Valentino waved his hands over the glass ball, careful not to disturb the wire, and Dani snapped his fingers, silently, causing it to glow with green and yellow light.

Nico waited for the mage signs to appear on the faces of the travelling people.

They never did.

The show ended and the lights dimmed and the crowd drifted back towards their homes.

“Why didn’t they appear?”  Nico asked.

Dani seemed tired.  His shoulders were slumped.  He’d tumbled all day and performed most of Vale’s show for him tonight.  “What should have appeared?” He asked. He was walking slowly, stretching his shoulder muscles, back towards the cook fires where dinner was being served.

“The runes.”  Nico said.

“What runes?”

“The ones that showed you who I was, the night I first came to your show.”

Dani stopped walked and looked at him.  “That doesn’t take place every time. We cast that spell only to allow us to find you.”


	11. Chapter 11

By high summer they were in a land far, far to the east of Nico’s home; the mountains were higher than he had ever thought possible, making the little pass they’d come over seem a saddle in a hill.   The passes through these mountains had entire villages dotted along them. Villages built on leveled ground, with cottages cut from the deep, brown stone. In the morning as they loaded their wagons to carry on their travels, Nico watched traders and visitors leave the town, backs loaded with supplies, on roads little more than pathways cut into the face of the sheer cliffs.

“The village s eems so empty,” Nico remarked.  At least a third of the population had vanished with the rising of the sun.

Dani had taken Nico under his wing, and Nico, once the now quick work of packing his own wagon was done, helped Dani and Jorge pack the stage wagon.

“Travel here is dangerous, and there are villages even more vastly distant in the Thunderstrike mountains.  Villages that are little more than a few goat huts set on rock outcroppings. They send someone to stay in the villages along the trade road, to collect the supplies they cannot tease from the stones themselves.  Those men will return home and bring the supplies and the stories and the news we brought of the outside world.”

“Now, they go.” Jorge said.  He watched a little man, burdened under a cloth wrapped bundle which jutted out on all sides concealing indecipherable shapes, trudge west on a path that was cobbled but on closer inspection was long steps cut into the underlying stone.  The billows of fog in the morning breeze soon obscured him, until he was a shadow, and then nothing.

The same wind was streaming the fog away in the other direction, and the morning sun shone on what had been concealed beneath the mist, all the day before.

A sheer drop.

Ten paces beyond their wagons, a narrow wall of stone had been built, and beyond that the mountain fell away.  Nico walked to the edge of the wall and looked over. In the dim distance he could make out the deep green of verdance that never saw enough sunlight, sliced by a river, so distant its color was faded to steel.

The village was halfway up the mountain.  Up the slope, as the fog cleared he could see the brighter green of damp meadows.  Dotted with the white and brown shapes of goats. The pathways led along mountain slopes in several directions and in the distance he could see them intersect with other distant green patches.

He backed away from the drop-off.

Jorge chuckled, but when Nico turned around, he’d already gone to put up the grain bags for the horses.  Dani was standing, hands on hips, watching.

“You didn’t realize?” He asked.

“No.  I didn’t.”

Dani nodded.  “Sometimes we walk a few footsteps from the pitfall and never realize the danger we are allowing ourselves into.”  The sun sparkled in his eyes and for a moment Nico thought he saw a glowing fire in them.

Such things were common in the company of mages.

It didn’t signify anything.

Lewis had sneezed a frog last week.  Talents manifested in unearthly ways.  That was all.

“Sometimes realizing the danger is there is enough, we don’t need to see the depth of the pit to know to stay away.” He patted the stone wall.

They stood facing each other in silence.

Loud laughter burst out from the other side of the wagons and echoed off the mountains above the village and the opposing stone faces.  Lewis had gathered himself a mentor, as well. He walked around the corner of the wagon, arm around Colin’s shoulders, and the two men laughed again at the shared humor, doubling up.

Nico huffed and returned to the wagon to finish tying the last bundles in place.  Those two should be working, not jesting about.

Ever since Lewis had won Vale’s horses off him, he and Colin had been the best of friends, dicing, and playing throwing stones, and telling each other rowdy stories.  Nico hurried to finish his task. He wasn’t working as hard as he had been earlier, and he wasn’t keeping as warm. The morning wind had picked up and he wanted to go to his wagon and get his warm coat, and maybe a hat.

He wished Lewis would put on a coat.  Something other than that silken shirt unlaced nearly to his ribs.  Even Colin was wearing his shirt laced today and in addition to his sash, an equally intricate embroidered vest.

Marc approached, pushing the two men aside and trotting up to Nico.  He seemed to trot everywhere. “Nico, would you tell me again of the way your people prepare redbroom?  I have a plan to use it to lighten the wagons. To make it easier for the horses to pull them over these passes,” He began.

A wave of nausea hit Nico, hard enough to knock him down.

In his mind all he could see was the purple wooden bindings of his great grandmother’s spellbook and dusky hands tracing it’s pages.

He stumbled to his feet, pushing past hands whose owners he couldn’t really make out.

The book was calling to him.

It’s spells had started becoming clear to him, but would require many years of study to fully understand.  The first of the spells had been simple enough to cast, an enchantment that would alert him if any hand but his touched it.

He wrenched open the door to his wagon, so hard it scraped on the floor of the step with a noise like a startled scream.

A tall, spare, figure was stooped over the book, tracing boney fingers over the swirling incantations and runes.  He looked up at Nico, face unapologetic and gaunt. His illness really had been getting worse over the weeks.

“I’m sorry for searching without you, Nico,” Valentino said, “I have to find an answer.”  He stumbled in the breeze as Lewis burst in behind Nico. “I’m running out of time.”


	12. Chapter 12

The shadows settled over Vale’s face, as though he was wearing the enchanted hat.  He had been returned to his own bed, and he slept fitfully beneath a pile of blankets twice as deep as any other in the camp.  Dani pressed a compress to his forehead and the man’s breaths began to deepen.

It was an uncomfortable fit in the wagon, with 4 of them.  Dani was sitting on the bed beside Vale, treating him with the healing he knew, Nico was assisting, Lewis was hovering, just out of the way, in the wagon’s tiny kitchen, and Colin was standing in the corner by the door, arms crossed like he was angry.  His thick gold earrings shone in the lamplight.

“I shouldn’t have left him,” Colin growled.

“Marc was supposed to be watching him.”  Dani passed the bowl of herbs he’d spread onto the compress to Nico, who passed it to Lewis to set on the worktop.

“Marc should know better than to buy in to his schemes when he’s in this state.”

Dani looked up sharply.  “Marc was 10 the last time he was in this state.  You remember what it was like to be young, I think.”

“I’m going to go talk to him.”  Colin stumped out the door, letting in a blast of icy wind and the cold light of the returned cloud cover.

“Tell them we need to get underway!” Dani yelled after him, relying on being heard through the wagon walls.  He looked back down at Vale and sighed.

“Are you going to tell us the truth?  It might help us find out what is actually wrong with him,” Nico said.

Dani sighed again, a long, lonely sound.

“We know exactly what is wrong with him.  Don’t worry. After the autumn equinox, you will have 10 years to figure out what to do when they return him to us.”

“He doesn’t have 10 years.” Nico said.  Vale had sickened since midsummer, and had lost weight, energy and all interest in participating in the camp’s life.  He roused himself for performances but that was all. By day he closed himself away having secretive conversations with Colin, and while they travelled he sat wanly on the seat of the wagon, wrapped in heavy quilts looking as though he would throw them open and sail away like a cut kite in a high wind.

“He will.  When they bring him back.”  Dani tucked a curl back under Vale’s headscarf.

“Who?” Lewis asked, drawn and quiet.

“The elves.”

Dani looked up.  “You’ve heard the legend of the man the dragon lured into the land of the elves, and he was trapped there, because he tasted their hospitality?”  A sort of light shone in his face. Not a glow, nothing magic, just emotion, as any normal man felt. “It was him. Valentino was the man.”


	13. Chapter 13

The mage climbed the rising tunnel, trembling as he reached out and pulled himself over the last lip of stone and saw the dragon’s horde.

Which was...nothing.

A lone girl, the young maiden from the village at the foot of his tower, was huddled on a woven carpet in the center of a cavern that must have been carved of limestone by thousands of years of water.

She turned and saw him and a moment’s gratitude turned to horror as a mighty, rushing wind filled the cavern.  The mage readied himself. The dragon was coming. The wind of its wings fluttered and then threshed the carpet and the girl threw herself face down, covering her head with her bare arms, her dress fluttering this way and that.

He could feel the stone of the mountain through his feet and it called to him and gave him strength.  No creature of wind could best him, here, in a place formed of his very element.

It was scarlet, rippling and iridescent, like a lizard among the heatwaves of the desert. With one mighty rush of its wings it soared up the hundred foot span the mage had taken an hour to climb.

It was met at the height of the cavern by a single spearpoint of stalactite the mage called from the living rock.

His heart skipped a beat when the spearpoint formed, and the dragon passed right through.

It circled, backwinging to land, and two stones the size of barns wrested from the walls and crushed its body between them.

They struck one another so hard that they fused with each other and to the ground.

The silence stretched.

The girl gradually looked up.  She turned and saw the snakelike tail of the creature, emerging from behind the massive boulders.  She looked back to the mage.

She stood and ran to him.  Her arms wrapped around his neck and her kiss tasted of the sweetest wine.

“Thank you, magus,” She whispered.  “For accepting my hospitality.”

A roar echoed through the cavern, matched by a rushing wind.

A great scarlet head rose up,  _ through _ the crush of stone, it’s forked tongue flicking.  The dragon looked down at it’s own belly, where the massive boulders vanished into it’s skin.  The illusion made a reptilian chuckle, and settled down with its head on its forepaws, like a dog, eyes on the maiden, ignoring the stone as completely as glamour ignored reality.

She stepped away from the confused mage, and her tattered dress became whole, woven from the petals of flowers, and her hair, singed short, grew long and luxuriant.  Her ears lengthened, and her features became somehow inhuman.

“Why would I want a human when I could have a mage?” The elf laughed.  Her voice was like the delicate drops of dew on a spider’s web. She had trapped him.

The cavern changed.  It had never been real, he understood now.  Somehow, on his journey here, he had passed into the land of the faeries, and she had fooled him into believing this brave quest would be his glory, instead of his downfall.

He had tasted a faerie’s hospitality, kissed her, and in so doing, consigned himself to be trapped in this realm.

She looked at him with long consideration.

“I will offer you a trade!” He burst out, speaking before he could think clearly, grasping at any hope.  The elvish love of trades might just be what saved him. “I give you my magic and in exchange, you free me into the world of men.”

She smirked.  “Mages are always the greatest of fools.  I could barely have hoped for a more pleasant arrangement.”  She snapped her fingers and the world went dark.

Her laughter followed him.


	14. Chapter 14

Vale woke in a bed in a tiny, tiny cottage.  A man and a woman were leaning over him. They were both very old.

“Valentino?” The woman asked.

He nodded.  His head hurt, like he’d fallen a long way.  He was suddenly flooded with memories of the elven world, of being that faerie’s slave.  It seemed like it had gone on a lifetime.

“We have some news that may come as a shock to you,” The man said.  “You are back in the human world, but...some time has passed. One hundred years have gone by.”

He tried to sit up, but his head swam.  “What has happened? How do you know this?”  He asked.

“We’re your grandchildren.  We’ve met you before.” Their faces were kind, and old, but not 100 years old.

“Just sit back and let us explain,” The woman said.  “10 years after you went hunting the dragon of Elborn, you were found wandering, dazed, outside your village.  Some of the folk recognized you even though you didn’t seem to have aged a day. You told them the faerie folk had taken you, made you a slave for them, even though you’d made a deal to be let free.  The deal hadn’t specified a time WHEN you were to be let free, or for how long.”

He remembered the wording now, sharply.  He felt for the stone of the earth, but he couldn’t sense it.  Not the great, living planet beneath him. Not even a pebble.

He moaned.

“The deal,” The man added hesitantly, “Also didn’t specify you should be able to recall what happened from one time to the next.  That first year, you went back to your life. It was the day of the spring equinox, and you returned to your tower and began to undo all the changes that had been wrought in your absence.  Then, as the summer went on, you began to weaken. As the autumn equinox approached, you were drawn back to the place in the forest where you’d been found. Then on the day of the equinox, you vanished again, only to appear 10 years later.  That was when you realized that your freedom was only as long as the summer.”

This was beginning to sound familiar.  Vale put his hands over his face. “Today is the spring equinox, then?”

They nodded.

“I will have to make preparations.  I will have to find mages to help me.  Someone to free me. Take me to my tower.  I will need my things.”

They shook their heads.  “That won’t be necessary.  With you absent the other mages moved in and took over your lands.  We rescued as much as we could, but most of it was lost. You have spent the last summers of your freedom regathering.  Before you vanished the last time we cast a spell to enchant your mind to remember when you arrive what has happened. It will take a few hours to unlock.”

“Where are we?” He asked.

“In a travelling band.  Made up of your descendants, the descendants of your loyal servants, and others who have joined us over the years.  The high mages won’t allow us to interfere with established territories, so we travel from place to place, in hiding.”

“We’ve become very good at it,” Said a new voice.  A young woman Vale hadn’t seen, sitting in the seat behind the older couple, weaving the finest ribbon he’d ever seen.

“This is my daughter, Taru,” Said the woman.  “She is learning to lead this group.” Vale examined the woman.  She had golden brown curls, as did her mother, that reminded him of his youngest brother, Keke.

The door burst open and a boy ran in.  He was no blood of Vale’s. His skin was pale and his hair brown, his eyes the color of glaciers on the high peaks.  He was staring at Vale as challenging as any castle guard. “We found you naked in the woods. Mama Esther said you was drunk.”

“Colin!” Taru said, sharply.  “Mind your manners.” Taru wound up her weaving and set the boy on the seat. 

He stuck his tongue out at Vale, who stuck his tongue out back.

She smacked his hand and gave him a bowl of apples.  “I’ll get you a knife.”

“Got a knife,” The boy grumbled, pulling a good, sharp blade out of his belt and beginning to skin the apples in neat, thin curls.  He was still staring at Vale with an angry expression.

“Where did he come from?” Vale asked.

“The sea, in the south.  We came upon a village struck by floods and the survivors didn’t seem to know where he’d come from.  He was there, among them, in the aftermath. They assumed he’d been on a ship that foundered in the storms.  They were all leaving to make a new start, and we brought him with us.” The old woman said.

The boy hissed, suddenly.  He’d cut himself on the sharp knife.

From his lips, the hissing produced a gout of flame.  It cauterized the wound. He waved his hand in the air a few times and when the smoke cleared away he went back to working as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Vale’s eyebrows rose.

“He was better off with us,” Taru said, stirring the kettle over the fireplace.

The memories of the past 10 summers did come back to him as the day wore on.  He had made plans, progressively, over the years. Suffering setbacks and false starts.  He had children the first summer, and they were waiting the next time he returned, growing older, their children growing older, each time he appeared.  This was the first summer he had not had to be told in painstaking detail what had been tried and what had gone right and what had gone wrong.

Yet, at the end of it, he found himself drawn to the forest yet again, and when the sun rose after the equinox, he had vanished.


	15. Chapter 15

Vale awoke in a bed, with a man and a woman leaning over him.

“Taru?” He asked, “Mick?  Taru, where is your mother, your uncle?”  He sat up. He remembered instantly, this time, and without the falling disorientation he had always woken with before.

She shook her head.  “Gone, a few years ago.”  She hugged him.

“I’m sorry.  I had really grown to love them.”

She dried her tears.  She had matured a great deal.  Her face had age lines, and there were speckles of grey in her hair.  She was still young and dynamic, though. She patted his chest. “Get up.  Things have gone on without you. Come and see.”

Outside, the camp was larger than he expected.  It had grown to nearly 20 wagons. Most of the adult faces looked familiar, but there were far more stocky, dark haired folk among them.

“More exiles from the lands of the warlords.  They refused to fight in his army, so he cursed them never to farm another plot of land.  They are kin to some of ours, so they’ve joined us.” Taru laughed. “They like it better with us.”

A gangly, teenager rode through the tangle of wagons and people on a tawny stallion, it’s hooves easily weaving around the firepit and the legs of people.  He had two of the stocky boys riding behind him, arms clinging around his bare, pale, belly. The one in the far back was blasting on a whistle as they rode, the one in front of him was waving a stick like a sword.

“DANI!” A woman screamed.

Colin heeled the horse to a stop, causing it to whinny.

The woman in the flowing red skirt and green blouse marched over, raising her hands.  The boy with the stick opened his hand, let the stick fall, shame on his face. “I’m sorry, mama.”

“What have I told you about swords?!” She said, plucking him off the horse and planting him on the ground.  She reached up and pulled the other small boy down.

Dani couldn’t have been more than 9 years old.  He looked at his bare feet and shuffled them in the dust.  “We left home so we wouldn’t have to fight, and playing fight here means we were lying, bout not wanting to.”

The other boy hung his head as well, but watched his friend, and blew a sad note on the whistle.

“Get to your chores.  You have better things to do than to shame us,” She said.  The boys turned and ran towards the red wagon with the yellow trim.

Colin folded his arms on the horse’s neck.  It wore no saddle or bridle, and his marvelous riding had all been done using the pressure of his legs.  “I’m sorry, Mama Esther.”

She looked up at him with a dark expression.  “A ruffian like you can hardly be expected to know any better.”

His face fell.

That was when he looked up and saw Vale.  He went bright red and with a nudge of his bare feet, the horse had taken off again, this time heading for the open fields outside the camp.

The woman turned, her skirt swirling, and looked up at Vale where he stood on the top step of Taru’s wagon.  “I’m sorry you had to see that. The boy has become headstrong and arrogant as he’s grown, and the little ones, they idolize the soldiers they see in the towns.”

He came down the steps and embraced her.  “I know you’re afraid for them. I will see what can be done to help you.  I will speak with Colin. Young men often just need something to occupy their minds, to keep them out of trouble.”  He smiled. The leadership of the band rested with the women and men who had built these families, but in a strange way, they all looked to him, and when he was among them he was expected to guide and resolve problems.

While he was with them this time, he would spend more time with the people.  His plan had gone into the long term, and he was no longer expecting to be free by the end of the summer.  Things would take a few more decades to come to fruition.


	16. Chapter 16

Vale woke in a bed with a man and woman leaning over him.

Taru and Mick had aged.  They both had grey hair and haggard features.   “How long has it been?” He asked, and they both flinched.

“Ten years, just the same.”  Mick said, in his dour voice.

“What’s wrong?” He demanded.

“War,” Taru answered, simply.

He burst out of the wagon.

The camp was in the same configuration as it had been when he left, the wagons drawn in a circle around the central campfire.  But there was a haze of smoke in the air and only 8 wagons. The number of people, trudging slowly about their chores, was too high for the number of wagons.  He went back inside and realized that Taru and Mick’s wagon was stuffed to capacity. Many more things than would be needed for them and their two children, even if their adopted son was still living with them.

“You lost wagons?” He asked.

“No horses to pull them,” Mick said.  “We’ve had to leave some behind in nearly every village.  The men stand guard every night to keep off the thieves.”

The door opened, then, and a young man Vale recognized as being the boy Jorge, from his last visit, came in.  He saw Vale and his face went still. Colin dragged in behind him, and hung their green and brown cloaks on the peg beside the door.  They both looked exhausted. 

“The horses are all still there,” His voice had deepened as his chest and shoulders had broadened.  “We had to kill a half dozen wild dogs that tried to get the sorrel mare.” He turned and then he saw Vale.

He took a deep breath, and when he let it out, it smelled faintly of smoke.  He had a smile just as faint. “I’m glad you’re here,” He said. “We need you.”  He turned to Mick. “Did you tell him about Dani?”

Vale turned.  Mick scratched at his scraggly curls.  He nodded, like he was conceding to himself that it had really happened.

“What happened to Dani?” Vale whispered.

“Couldn’t deny his nature,” Mick said.

“He could have!” Jorge yelled.  “I do not have to go forge swords.  He could have stayed. He is too weak.”

Colin was looking down at his own bare feet.  He stepped out of the way as Jorge stormed out the door.  “Can’t tell him it’s different for a smith mage.” He murmured.  “He knows knives are just a step from swords. He hasn’t even forged a saw blade since Dani left.”

“Dani is a battle mage.  We couldn’t expect this life to satisfy him.  We can’t deny our natures,” Mick grumbled.

Vale shook his head.  “He went to join the fighting?”

Colin bit his lip.

“No,”  Taru said.  Her voice was a growl.  “Dani became the warlord.”

They spent the summer running.


	17. Chapter 17

Vale woke up in a bed with a man standing in the kitchen, making soup.  He was dark and stocky, and Vale had never expected to see him again.

“I’m sorry I let you down,” Dani whispered.

“What happened?”

“Jorge came after me.  He walked into the center of my war camp.  He told them he was a master smith and showed them what he could do.  They brought him to me.” Dani neatly sliced potatoes and put them into the boiling pot.  It smelled good. Like it had already been cooking a long time and he was topping it up with new vegetables and new stock.  Eternal soup, the travelling folk called it.

Ironic that he was making it now.

He held a hand up.

There was a silver manacle on it.

“I can’t fight anymore.”

Vale sat, silently, and remembered the bloodshed a decade before.

“What will you do?”

Dani smiled and nodded at the soup.  “I am learning to heal.” The satisfaction in his voice made Vale look at the young mage again.  When he had known him it had always been a struggle with his conscience. Whether he would fight or not.  He had always believed if he was not a warrior he must not use his talent at all.

Disrupting life forces and repairing them were two sides of the same coin.

He had made a good choice.

Fortunate he had someone like Jorge to help him.

Vale looked around the wagon.  “These are my things. You have adopted my belongings?”

“No.  This is your wagon.  We finally realized you might not want to live with Mama Taru and Mick everytime you come stay with us, and you were collecting too many things to fit on the stage cart.”

The place looked lived in, though.  “You stay here?”

Dani smiled again, “No.  Jorge likes to keep me close.  I stay with him.”

That smile held a depth of meaning Vale found interesting.

Dani clapped his hands off and wiped them on a piece of toweling he’d tucked into his sash.  “Breakfast is done. I’ll leave you two alone.” He slipped quietly out of the door.

A moment later the door creaked open again, letting in the lemon sunlight of the first spring dawn.  Colin had a bundle of wood held tight with a strap, up on his shoulder. His shoulders were even broader, now, than they had been in his twenties.  He swung the wood to the floor and hefted it into the little woodbox.

He came and sat on the edge of Vale’s bed.

Colin’s bed, he suspected.  “I missed you,” He said. Soft tones to contrast with the rough calluses of his fingers.  “I have good news. I think I found your mother’s grimoire.”


	18. Chapter 18

Nico clung to the outcrop they’d climbed.  The sounds of the caravan echoed up the crisp stone to them, invisible through the mist, silver below them and golden above.  The wind whistled, rushing the familiar, warm, sounds away, and pulling his woolen hood off his head, to flap at his neck. He looked at Lewis.  Lewis was in a pale leather cloak, wrapped and tied with a belt. There was light coloured fur lining the hood and it made his face look stark. He turned his attention back to the stone, reaching for another hold.

His laughter was too familiar to disappear in the high wind.

He followed his brother, muscles trained to balancing and climbing, performing acrobatics on horseback, this solid stone and the wind never gave him pause.  They climbed as fast and capably as any lizards on the brown, sun warmed stones of the towers at home.

They climbed onto a narrow ledge Marc had spotted when the mist had thinned.  He was waiting for them, just as out of breath and excited, and they laughed at their racing.  The mist had thinned, and coming onto the ledge, they had come free of it. They turned their backs to the wall of the mountain.

They had reached the end of the pass.

The mist filled the valley below the Thunderstrike mountains.  The great standing peaks, blades of living stone, pricking the sky.  They dropped with no break, to the floor of the plain. From the mist, 20 miles distant rose the Lost Child.  A peak forever separated from its brethren.

Nico could see that it was their destination as clearly as he had seen the runes in magesight, that day, so many weeks before, when he began the first steps on this journey.

“What will you do when you arrive there?” Marc asked, folding his hands between the small of his back and the stone wall.

“Elves want a price.  We’ll find out what they want.  We may have to travel to their land.  We will be sure not to eat anything or kiss anyone.”  He was aware of Lewis watching him say this. He didn’t believe Nico’s plan was sufficient.

“They must want something certain,” Marc said, “Something more than Vale’s power.”

“I think the answer is in my grandmother’s spellbook.”

They had only a few days to find it.

The equinox sun would set, and then they would be obliged to wait for 10 years.

The sun drifted in the sky to the right of the peak below them, pale and yellow behind a thin cover of cloud.

“I was 7 the last time he came to live with us,” Marc said into the silence as the wind died.  “He is such a great hero to my people. The high mage.”

“But none of you have ever seen him do the magic,” Lewis said.

He shook his head.  “We don’t doubt. He understands magic.  He knows things only high mages are trained to know.  He understands the spells. For so long, no one else was able to read the words in the spell books.”

“Until Nico and I came to help you,” Lewis nodded.

Marc looked down and snorted.  “High mages are so gracious,” He said, almost as if he was saying it to himself.

“Is it true about Dani?” Nico asked.

“What do you mean?”

“He is a battle mage?”

The boy’s hands came out from behind his back and crossed over his chest, like he was feeling the cold.  “He is a healer. He left us, but he is home. He is a hero.”

A sound rang through the mountain.  Almost more felt through their feet on the stones than heard.  An iron hammer striking stone.

“Time to go.”  Marc scrambled down the ledge and Lewis followed.  They disappeared from sight almost immediately in the mist.

Nico stood and looked into the yellow sky, at the lost mountain in the distance.  Then he, too, descended into the fog.


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter 19**

  
The pass road descended in long hairpin switchbacks cut into the steep edge of the mountain.  When they passed below the fog line on the winding road, it became apparent that the Thunderstrike mountains were not a natural phenomenon.

The mountains, on the other side, where they had entered the pass, had been at the pinnacle of days of riding uphill, gradually climbing elevation, then foothills, and then mountains growing higher.

This side of the mountain range had no foothills.  The mountains as far to either side as could be seen dropped directly to the valley floor and stopped.

Nico looked at the sudden edge of the raw stone of the mountains.  They reached the ground in a single smooth line. No outcropping, no hill, no rise ran beyond it.

As they came below the mist, the traveling folk’s normally boisterous, happy noise quieted.  The road was narrow, aside from wide switchbacks, and the drivers were concentrating. The mist had been chillingly cold, even more than the air of the pass and the children and families, who normally walked, chattering and playing alongside their wagons, and never inside, to save the horses, were clustered inside the warm painted wagons.

Now they were nearing the bottom.  

At the head of the line, Colin slowed his wagon and stopped.  They were too far back to hear what he turned and said to Mick, whose wagon usually took foremost place, unless Vale was living with them.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Lewis asked. He did not wait for Nico to reply, but stood from the wagon seat beside him, and turned to lift himself into the roof of the wagon.

Nico continued watching the scene at the front of the caravan.  Mick got down off the blue wagon and walked up to talk to his adopted son.  The sturdy man was wearing an orange vest a shade darker than the veins of rusted iron that ran through the veins of the mountains, here, and pants such a bright yellow/green that Nico had never seen anything that compared to it, but when he said this, Lewis got a dreamy look in his eye and said when he and his mother were traveling south to come live with Mika and Nico’s family, they had passed through a black forest. Where the leaves of the trees were so narrow and thin they weren’t leaves at all, but like the spines of hedgedogs, and the trunks rose straight like fence posts with no branches until 10 or 20 spans above the ground.  The trees, needles and bark alike were such a dark green they looked black. But these needle trees had been covered in a lace of a parasitic plant, so bright is seemed to glow, especially when the sunlight managed to shine through the unimaginably high forest canopy, turning the black of the trees into an appealing deep emerald color.

There were two thumps on the top of the wagon, like the band of a barrel being dropped on the wood.  Then the wood creaked. Nico jumped when something huge and brown jumped down past him. 

The creature on the ground was waist high on the piebald horse, nearly as wide at the foreshoulders, with a back that sloped to its hind legs.  It’s front legs were bow legged and nearly pointed in at the toes. It’s head was far too large for its body, and too wide, like a ball of clay that had been pressed in on one side and so had been squeezed outward in every other direction.  It’s mouth was ludicrously oversized, which somehow made up for it’s almost complete lack of a muzzle. It was not a mouth, really, it was a maw, and it dropped foul smelling ooze.

It was wearing a milky white collar that had magically extended to fit it’s nearly barrel sized neck.

It looked up to the top of the wagon, where it’s master stood, and it’s maw seemed to stretch into a smile.  It made a windy sound like air being drawn into a massive cave, and shook its head, spraying it’s gelatinous mucus, and wagged its tail.

Another, equally grotesque beast jumped down beside it.

The horses were strangely unaffected by the apparition beside them.  They had seen the creatures before when Lewis had brought them out to exercise then.  The whole caravan was familiar with the sight of the beasts, though they normally appeared as hounds, terriers or spaniel, not these monsters.

This was Lewis’s favorite form.

“Roscoe, Cocoa, be good puppies for daddy and go down and look at the stone at the bottom of the mountain,” Lewis’s voice came from above Nico’s head on top of the wagon, sweet like people unaccustomed to children used when talking to babies.  He said it was something about the tone that made the control spell work. If he didn’t say the words in the high pitch, the unnatural dogs would ignore him as they ignored everyone else. “Good puppies, good dogs. Go on!”

The dogs turned and starting a slow run that quickly built speed, loped down the road, passing the wagons and eliciting startled cries from traveling folk who hadn’t expected the eldritch abominations to come hurtling past them with no more sound than a breathy huff every time their forepaws hit the ground.

They passed the two men in the lead of the group.  Colin and Mick watched them pass with no sign of fear, but looked up the line of wagons to Lewis.

The dogs were still charging down the switchbacks.  Nico stood and then climbed up onto the wagon to see their progress better.  He stood beside Lewis, their cloaks wrapped around them, too tight for even the edges to flap in the breeze, and watched the dogs lope to the bottom of the last switchback, three turns below them.

Lewis whistled.

The pony sized dogs gave perspective to the stone rim at the bottom of the mountains.  They were tiny in comparison to it. It was a square lip of stone, like the edging on a terrace, or, as Nico’s eyes adjusted, like the edge of a massive man made pond.  In fact, as the mountains dropped nearly to the stone rim, and the smooth green beyond reminded him of a koi pond he had seen once, when he had visited the high levels of one of the other Seven Towers.

The rim, when seen against the dogs, he realized, must have stood 3 meters off the road where the dogs milled in the sudden dead end.  It was easily 500 meters wide.

“Can my sweetiekins get on top and find out what is on the other side for daddy?” Lewis asked, performing the magical gesture of putting his hands on his knees and wagging his head from side to side.

The dogs could hear him, no matter the distance, so it was effective, even though he was apparently saying it to the empty air.  Nico still laughed at him.

Mick and Colin looked down the slope, to watch the dogs.

They milled a moment longer, then gathered themselves and lept easily up the 3 meter distance, landing lightly as cats, despite their ugly bulk, on the stone top of the rim.

The instant their paws touched the surface, they barked and vanished.  Two puffs of pink smoke dissipated quickly in the wind, and Nico heard two clangs as the collars dropped, empty, to the stone.

Mick said something and Colin just shook his head with a wry grin.

Colin swung down from the wagon seat and clapped his father on the back.  He and Mick went into the back of the wagon. Vale was in no condition to sit in the cold mist, today.

“Damn,” Lewis said.  “How am I supposed to get the collars back from THERE?”

They weren’t hurt, of course.  When the dogs were injured the spell ended and they returned to the dimension within the collars, or the dimension to which the collars were a portal, or whatever.  Lewis had explained how it worked but it was a particular crux of both dimensional magic and animal magic that Nico had no hope of understanding.

If he couldn’t get the collars back from where they lay atop the stone rim, though, then the dogs were as good as gone.  The spell would degrade, without the animals passing through the collars at least every 10 days, and they would lose their magical properties.

The other dimensional dogs would be freed of their restraints and wander the other side doing as they pleased.

“I’m sure you can get Alex to push them off for you with the wind,” Nico said, taking Lewis’ hand to steady him as he bellied off the wagon roof and groped with his foot for the frame of the seatbox, and then following him down.

The conference in the lead wagon didn't last long, and soon Mick and Colin were back in their positions and the caravan continued down the slope.

“There is a sheer wall at the end of this road.  How are we supposed to get past that?” Nico asked.

“Well they’ve made this trip before, that’s obviously not a new feature.  I mean, it couldn’t be, could it?” Lewis scanned the mountain rim, as far as the eye could see in either direction.  “What is it, anyway? And how...the mountains just  _ stop _ .  It’s like they knew exactly how far they could grow and no further.”

“It’s amazing,” Nico agreed.

They came to it and it was impressive.  The caravan stopped before they reached the stone rise, and most of the traveling folk waited on their wagon seats as they had waited higher up the road.

Nico and Lewis jumped down to join Mick and Taru at the back of Vale’s wagon.  Dani and Jorge came forward with Marc trailing them. They stood in front of the massive pale granite.  It was evenly veined with iron, gone orange with rust. The stone was a pale grey, instead of the dark brown it had been in the mountains, but the odd lacework of iron that ran through was the same.

The door of the wagon opened, and Colin stepped onto the first step, sideways, his arm around Vale’s back under the felted woolen blanket.  He helped the Mage out and onto the ground. Vale looked worse in the diffuse light through the misty sky than he had the last time Nico had sat and reviewed the grimoire with him in the lamplit wagon.  His lips were cracked and his eye had dark circles.

It was the first time most of them had seen him since he started staying in the wagon all the time.

“He is so much worse,” Jorge said, in a low voice.  “He used to be fine until the day before the Equinox.  Why is it taking him so hard?” He looked at Dani, who shook his head and put his hand on Jorge’s shoulder.

Vale waved a hand at Lewis and Nico was alarmed how it looked like yellowing bone in this light.  “Your gates, what metal are they made of?”

“The collars? They aren’t metal, they are glass.”

Nico had never known that.

Vale looked at Jorge.

“What kind of sand was melted to make the glass?” He asked.

“Marble.”

This time Jorge looked at Vale, who shook his head.

“We can leave them up there, they won't interfere with the charge,” He told Mick.  Colin helped him to ease down on the wagon’s rear step, away from the wall.

He leaned back against the purple painted door and closed his eyes with a sigh.

Jorge smiled at Dani, who smiled back and nodded encouragingly, and Jorge sauntered up to the wall.  He touched the surface.

Nico half worried he would vanish in a puff of blue dust, but he did not.

He brushed the tip of his middle finger over one of the iron veins.  The rust came off leaving shining iron behind. He rubbed the rust between his fingertip and thumb with a calculating expression on his face, and then let it fall away.

He located a nexus where a large number of the veins came together.  It would have been eye level to Vale, but for him it was a few inches over his head.  He examined it, and without warning, struck the surface of the node with a resounding smack.

There was a beat, and then the rust fell off the surface of the iron veins like so much sand being dropped.

Nico looked along the wall.  It curved away from them, so at this vantage it could only be seen for 200 meters or so.  The rust was gone from all of it. The surface was imbedded now, in shining wires.

“Heh.”  Jorge walked back to the rest of them, a smug grin on his face.  Vale opened one eye and grinned at him. Dani slapped his hand amiably.

“Your turn,” Vale said.

Mick stepped up to the wall and held his hands out at shoulder height, like he would do a push-up.  He touched with only the palms of his hands.

Nico’s hair all tried to stand on end.

Mick’s hair certainly stood on end.  He groaned and stood, hands on either side of the node Jorge had located, straining like he was trying to push the wall.

After seeing Jorge slap the rust free from a kilometer of wire, Nico wouldn’t have been surprised to see at least a section of the wall start sliding back.  Until he remembered the stone run was 500 meters across.

Instead, a slice of stone beside Mick, in front of the lead wagon, slotted down to just a few centimeters above the level of the road. And then, like a stack of paper, set on end and balancing precariously for a moment, the slip became a spill, and a section of wall 7 meters across dropped straight down, each progressively deeper slice barely higher than the last, until a ramp wide enough for the wagons was notched into the face of the wall.  They could pass on this opening, to reach the top surface of the rim.

Mick peeled his hands away from the wall with a sticky sound.

Dani was there beside him, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders.  He murmured quietly, “I’ve still got it.”

“Yes, Mick, you’ve still got it,” Dani agreed.  “Let’s get you inside and get you some salve.”

He was euphoric in the way mages were when reaching close to the limit of their talent.  Vale watched Dani and Taru lead him to the wagon. He would be allowed to ride, now, as well.  

Vale braced himself and grabbed the bar beside the step.  “Time to move on,” He directed.

Colin came to him, reaching out “Let’s get you up inside.”

The Mage shrugged him away.  “No, I will ride here.”

“Valentino.  It's cold, just let me get you inside,” Colin lowered his voice and tried not to cast a glance over his shoulder at Nico and Lewis watching.

There was no answer but a renewed grip on the bar.

Colin’s shoulders sagged.  “You don’t want at least to ride with me on the box?”

Still no answer.  Vale tucked the edges of his blanket around him so they wouldn't trail in the dust.

He turned and looked at Taru with an unspoken warning to keep an eye on Vale, and crouched eye to eye with his Mage.  He smiled weakly and then brushed the limp hair from Vale’s face. He gave him a soft kiss and Vale smiled just a little bit.

He nodded and turned to the front of the wagon.  “Be ready to pull away, or we’ll leave you behind, Nico,” He called.

“What just happened?” Nico asked Jorge.

“The circle is a barrier.  The stone is full of silver wires.  When Mick puts the lightning through it, he can tell it was to do,” Jorge walked back with them to their wagon.

“Silver doesn’t rust,” Nico objected.

“No.  It was covered with an iron coating that had all rusted through since the last time we came through here.  I’ll put it all back on when we come out. Keeps scavengers from coming down here and picking out the silver.”  He nodded to them and moved on to his wagon.

“Must have taken a lot of lightning to move this much stone,” Lewis said, as their wagon approached the walls of the ramp.

“An incredible amount,” Nico agreed.  His eyes were fixed on the places Mick had touched the facing of the walls and the two pale, red dotted marks he had left when the wall peeled the skin of his hands away.

The caravan reached the top of the ramp and Lewis hopped off the side of the wagon and jogged across the smooth stone surface to retrieve his dog collars, then jogged back and caught up with the wagon, climbing back up into the seat.

“Got my dogs back,” He laughed.

They traveled easily across the stone surface of the rim, and Nico looked back to watch the switchbacks of the pass grow smaller as they left them behind.  From down here, the sheer, unbreachable wall of the mountains was an undeniable barrier. Clearly designed to keep something from this side reaching out.

The rim had no drop on the far side as it did beside the mountains.  It ended and they drive onto the dirt road of the green land beyond with barely a bump.  From there, the land rose in a gentle, hilly slope.


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter 20**

 

“Why do I have a feeling this whole valley is a perfect circle, with that weird lone mountain in the middle?”  Lewis asked as they made camp on the first level ground since they’d left the stone rim.

“It is,” Valentino creaked.

He had appeared from the shadows between the wagons and was outlined against the firelight.

“We have just reached the edge of the slope of the giant’s haha.”  He eased himself down on the mossy ground beside the wagon wheel. The families were making their own small fires, tonight, but the lively atmosphere was returning, and Nico could hear Colin’s bittern playing somewhere up ahead.  “Have you ever seen a haha, Nico?”

“What is it?” He asked.

“A haha is a kind of ditch used in warfare.  It has a gentle slope to the bottom on one side, and a sheer wall on the other.  It forces the enemy to come down the slope in the open, and your troops stand on the wall and fire on them.  Once they have reached the bottom, they have to face the climb up the sheer wall to face you.”

Nico nodded, waiting for Valentino to explain.  This certainly was an open slope to the foot of the wall of mountains,  but it was far too large to be designed to dissuade any kind of army.

Most generals would not be so considerate as to pen their army in the bottom of this round valley, anyway.

“A haha is also used to keep animals penned,” Lewis said.  “They can walk down the slope but not get past the wall. And it doesn’t hinder the eyeline like a regular fence.”

“So you can stand at the top and see the whole pen,” Vale agreed.

“What in hellfire were you keeping in here?” Lewis asked.

“Haven’t you been paying attention?” Nico asked, keeping his eye on the ground nuts he was slicing for boil.  “This is where Valentino trapped the dragon.”

The perfectly circular valley, with the mountain in the center had been apparent to Nico since the moment they’d seen it.  He didn't know what a haha was, but he knew what a pen was. He knew a Mage liked to live where there was plenty of their element available, and where would an Earth Mage be more comfortable than the greatest mountain range in the world?

“How long did it take you to flatten a 60 kilometer circle of mountains?” Nico asked, awed by the thought.

“A day,” Valentino said, and started to push himself weakly to his feet, “Nothing in comparison with how long it took to raise the whole range.”

He chuckled at their dismay.  Marc and Dani came out of the shadows and Dani tutted at Vale, putting his arm around his back and letting him lean on him as he hobbled towards his own fire.

Marc came and sat down.  “What are you two eating for dinner?  I was practicing with Dani so long that Alex went to Tatiana’s to have dinner.  If you will offer me something to eat, I will help you decipher that book of spells Vale thinks hides the answer to his freedom.”  Suiting action to words, Marc picked up a piece of the grass hen Lewis had roasting over the fire.

Nico shook himself.  “I thought you said Vale was the only one of you who could read the high magics.”  He settled into his place by the fire.

“No,” Marc pulled off another piece of succulent hen, “I said it had been a long time since we had another Mage who could read them.  You assumed I meant you. Alex and I can both do it. He is very new, so he could probably only read the first two or three spells of your book.”

Lewis nudged Nico.  It had taken Nico months of practice to be able to read ANY of the spells, and Lewis could read advanced dimensional grimoires and any enchanted bestiary, but couldn’t read any of the spells in Nico’s grimoire at all.

“I haven't had the opportunity to read any books other than the ones in Vale’s library.”

Nico and Lewis thought it was cute how the traveling folk thought the 3 shelves of books in Vale’s wagon was a library.  Each of the Seven Towers had a room of books, stacked from the floor to the ceiling, and with a maze of shelves running among them.

But they could read almost none of them.

3 shelves of grimoires a Mage could read was a thousand times as powerful as a castle full of books that meant nothing.

They rushed through dinner and rushed inside.  Nico brought out the grimoire and did the complex series of motions to compel it to open.  He pushed it into Marc’s hands.

Marc flipped through it. The first dozen pages of writing stayed still for Nico’s eyes, but after that they began to swim and make no sense, and for Lewis, who had no ability in healing, the whole book looked that way, but Marc turned pages, running his finger over the invisible lines of text long after, explaining to them what he saw.

It was not a spell book as Nico understood them, with lists of ingredients or directions for incanting spells.  It explained magical principals, and left the interpretation up to the magic user.

“If you can do this, why hasn’t Vale had you in here helping us since the beginning?” Lewis asked.  “Is this one of those ‘If you don’t learn it yourself, it’s not worth knowing’ things?”

Marc laughed hard at this, “No, Vale doesn’t bother with teaching like this, if you can do it, you can do it, he believes.”  He turned a page and Nico noticed the one he had turned off of had nothing on it, not even swirling letters. “He will not let me read the grimoires because he says I am too hungry for power.”

As he ran his finger over the last page the swirling thinned and disappeared, leaving a blank.

Nico’s heart wrenched.

Marc stood up and dropped the book in Nico’s hands as he passed.  “Thank you,” He said, distantly, like Mick had sounded that morning at the wall.

The covers of the book were no longer purple, they were the color of regular, old wood.

Nico cried out and flipped through the pages. They were no longer stiff and heavy, they were limp and soft and every one of them was blank.

“You stole the spells!” Nico shouted.

Marc turned at the door, “Don’t worry.  I will free Vale. He has had the power long enough.  It is my turn, now.”

Nico and Lewis reached to stop him, but there was a fiery flash, and they both lost consciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this development-  
> A) Stupid  
> B) Boring  
> C) Unexpected  
> D) Really F-ing infuriating  
> E) A good one


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter 21**

 

Nico dreamed about the caravan.

The dream began with a group of people, dressed in clothing patched with whatever mismatched cloth they could get their hands on, searching a large forest, until they found a man, emaciated and naked, stumbling through the woods.  He was brought, wrapped in a blanket, to a camp of tents set on the backs of wagons and carts.

He emerged later, dressed, and awake, and began to speak to the disheartened group.

Began to lead.

He appeared in the forest later, as the leaves were turning, looking as disoriented as he had when he’d been found.

The next year, the search ended more quickly, and the next, there were two men, a small cart with them, waiting, when the man fell through a flash in the air and struck the ground, precisely as the sun rose over the horizon.

Nico watched generations pass in blinks.  He watched, unable to identify much of anything, until a familiar face appeared in the crowd who had come to wish Vale farewell.  A young Taru.

The next year, as Vale was carefully picked off the ground, Nico saw rustling in the bushes, and a swarthy woman leading a very small blonde boy away.  Berries spilled from his basket as he protested his treatment.

When they returned him, he seemed, for the first time, hopeful.

In the dim forest, a flash of light burned the air.

Vale dropped out, landing neatly on his feet in a crouch.

He was still weak, naked, and pale, but he stood, shoulders back, and smiled that smirk Nico had become so familiar with.  He clapped the waiting men on the shoulders and wrapped the blanket around his waist. As a concession to his starvation, he took a seat on the cart.

This was the first time he would have returned, fully remembering from the beginning.

Nico had never seen a man looking more ready.

When the group returned to see him off, it was always a small group of the caravan’s leaders and those he had grown especially close to, Vale walked side by side with a tall teenager, who moved like a strung bow.  The teenager was listening to something Vale was explaining with fervent hand gestures, and as they walked Vale seemed, over and over, to remember one more piece of knowledge he needed to impart to the boy, until finally, he had to run the last few steps to the place he would vanish, and barely reached the place in time to turn and wave before he vanished in a blink.

The other men stood for a moment, but the instant Vale vanished, the blonde teen turned back and started walking quickly towards the camp, and when he turned Nico’s direction, Nico was surprised to see him scrubbing his face with the back of his arm, wiping away the tears.

He was going to miss his mentor very much.

As Mick and another man, who looked like an older version of Tatiana, walked back the other direction, Nico heard the words, “Well, he’s gone again, and he’s left us with one very lovesick teenager.”

Could he mean Tatiana?

No, she couldn’t be old enough.

There must be someone else, back at the camp.

Nico tried to think of women among the travelling folk who were about Colin’s age.

The next spring he watched the men approach, they were dragging their feet, as though they were exhausted.  They stood straighter as they reached the place where Vale would arrive. There was Mick and the man who looked like Tatiana, again.  Usually in the spring under the rising sun, two men came to collect Vale alone. This was, Nico suspected, because whatever clothes he had been sent away in, he arrived naked.

He fell from the flash of light again, covered himself, and climbed into the cart.  He seemed more exhausted this time, and he was asleep almost before he was out of the little clearing.

When the farewell party returned, it was made up of Mick, Taru, Colin and Jorge, but the man who looked like Tatiana was gone.  As before, Vale and Colin walked side by side, speaking intently among themselves, Vale thinking of things he had certainly, by Colin’s patient nods, already told him.  Mick and Taru stood back this time, and Jorge stood behind them, with his fists clenched. He had a livid healing wound on his face, and his sleeve was puffy with bandages.

Colin interrupted Vale’s recitation of final information, by touching his face, and silencing him with a long, deep kiss.  When he withdrew, the two men stood face to face with gentle smiles.

He didn’t need to hear the words they whispered.  He could see their lips move.

“I will miss you,” Vale whispered.

“I will be ready,” Colin answered.

Loathe to release his hand, Colin trailed him nearly to the place Vale would vanish, then Vale let go and stepped away.  He smiled bravely at Colin, and then nodded to the others.

He vanished and the others moved out of the clearing, leaving Colin standing in the darkening evening for a long time by himself, before he turned and walked back to the camp, to face the next decade.

Alone.

 


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter 22**

  
  


Nico gasped and light filled his eyes as air filled his lungs.

He was on a hard wooden floor.  His left leg was tangled against something painfully firm, and his right was being crushed by someone else’s leg.  Dani was hovering over him. No, just leaning over him, waving a cloth that smelled sharp, like lemons and urine, in front of his face.  He pushed it away.

“Marc stole the spellbook!” He yelled.  He tried to push himself up, but everything spun so he fell back to his back.  “Vale fell down naked, and they had to bring him in a cart. Colin cried when he left, and then kissed him in the woods.  I think the man who looked like Tatiana died.”

There was a snort.

Dani looked over his shoulder.  Then he turned back towards Nico and moved to the side.  Nico turned and saw Lewis, lying on his back beside him where they’d fallen, mouth open and eyes closed.

“Lewis!”

Dani waved the cloth in front of Lewis’ nose, too and he began to cough.

“Don’t go telling everyone that, alright?”  Nico looked towards his feet. Colin was crouching there.

“You shaved your head again!” Nico accused.  The last time he’d seen him, in the dream, he still had hair.

“Yeah,” Colin reached out and grabbed Nico’s hand, “Conroe Sea sailors shave their head when they have a vendetta.  I won’t grow it out again until my family is safe.”

‘You have been part of this family for a long time.”  Nico swayed and sat on the edge of the bed so he didn’t fall over.  “Why did you start shaving now?”

Colin looked down at Lewis, sitting up on the floor, and Dani examining the back of his head for bumps.  “It’s only for spouses and children. For my tribe I would just shave the right side and for my country I would just shave the left.  Conroe burned in the wars,” Nothing changed in his tone when he said this, but Nico saw Dani cringe.

Dani’s war?  Destroyed Colin’s homeland?

“And the folk are my tribe, but my spouse comes first.”

“You cried…” Nico started, and Colin made an irritated face and patted his hand onto Nico’s mouth.

“I was 17.  I had no idea what love is, and I had romantic ideas about what my life was going to be like.  Everyone is young to begin with. You never cried over some pretty buck you couldn’t have? Doesn’t mean anything.”

Nico felt like this was a personal attack.  He pushed at Colin’s hand.

Colin leaned close and said, “You need to have a very serious heart to heart with your “brother.””  He held Nico’s mouth a moment longer and said, “You guys are pretty sure you know the way love is supposed to be, but I think you’re missing a few key elements.”  Then he released Nico’s mouth, which dropped open at the audacity.

“What did you say to me?” He breathed.

“Same thing I said when Lewis told me he found out Jorge and Dani were handfasted, and had no idea what it meant.”  He said this loud enough the others could hear him, and they both looked up.

Dani expressionless, and Lewis disbelieving.  “Hey!” Lewis started.

Colin tapped Dani’s shoulder.  “We need to go make sure Vale has Alex under control.”

The battle mage turned healer couldn’t get out of the wagon fast enough.  The firebreather followed, with a cheeky grin as he closed the door.

From outside, Nico heard Dani’s voice, “Kissed him in the woods?”

And Colin’s smug, “Kissed him a lot of places.”

Lewis looked up from where he sat on the floor, knees up, propped up on his hands, and shook his head at Nico.  “Listen, I…”

“No, you don’t need to explain.”  He shifted his weight on the bed and thought back on their growing up together.  “I think I know.”

He reached out a hand and helped Lewis up to sit on the edge of the bed.

They sat side by side for a long time, listening to Dani’s sharpe words about irresponsibility rise and then fade as the other two men walked across the camp.

Then Lewis took Nico’s hand.


	23. Chapter 23

**Chapter 23**

  
  


They walked up the slope, into the forest around the mountain, on a grown over track.  The ferns crushed under the cart’s wheels, and the travelling folk walked in silence, except for the creak and chunk of the cart as it rolled.  The further they got into the trees, the harder it was to see and hear the camp on the edge of the wood, where the slope steepened to the stone circle.

Nico and Lewis walked with heads down, their hoods pulled low.  The squelch of their bare feet on the mossy path was an accustomed sensation, now.  Vale had been teaching them to feel grounded with the earth, a skill he said every kind of mage could benefit from, and a skill he could teach with no magic himself.

He had been teaching them to breathe as wind mages did, as well.

Nico felt he had a better understanding of his healing, since he had begun learning the principles of the other disciplines.

Dani and Jorge walked ahead of them, each holding a handle of the cart.

Taru and Mick walked ahead of them, as dejected as any cats who’d ever come in out of a rainstorm.

Colin walked beside the cart, shoulders tense, and constantly checking that the blanket over Vale was tucked.  “I ache thinking you’re going back to those monsters,” He said, so low he didn’t intend the others to hear.

The mage smiled, but it took him a moment, and his papery eyelids never opened.  “You will have work to do, you won’t notice my absence.” 

His words had the opposite of the desired effect, and Colin ground his teeth.

The path climbed another rise.  The men helped push the cart up the little slope, where runoff had cut the hillside.  Then they were in a wide space between tree trunks, where high branches shaded all the light, except for directly above, where the stone foot of the mountain rose abruptly, and high beyond the trees, the peak was visible.

It did not feel any different than other places.

The light was falling, though.

Vale’s thin hand reached up and grasped the edge of the cart.  He pulled himself into a seated position. The blanket fell around him, and his shirt hung flaccid around his ribs.

The big bald man knelt in front of the cart and held his hand to Vale’s chest.  “Valentino.” His face looked agonized.

The sickly mage shook his head.  “Do not ask me to try to stay. Please, give me heart.  Show me you will not suffer too badly for my loss.”

“Ten more years,” Colin’s throat caught.

“I cannot stay for your next ten years.”  He looked up around at all of them. “I will regret missing them.  I was hoping to share them with my family.” He swallowed hard. “I know you will not heed me if I ask you to stop the search, but if, when you return, I do not appear, it is because I am losing strength.”

He looked afraid, for the first time since Nico had ever known him.

“We will search,” Nico said.  “There are other spellbooks. There are other mages.  Do not lose hope.” He moved and knelt behind Colin. “I made an agreement, Valentino.  It is harder than lightning. A bond between two mages.”

Lewis came and knelt beside him.

Taru, Mick, Dani and Jorge ranged around them and knelt.

Vale nodded.

He stood out of the cart bed.  He walked the last paces up the slope.

They stood for his passing.

There was still great fear in his eyes, and Nico saw he had no hope.  He remembered the confident, ready, assured Vale that had dropped from the flash of light years before, and knew that, with the spells of the Grimoire, that Vale had been lost.

He had waited more than a hundred years for his freedom, and watched the last chance evaporate like a note blown from a horn fading over a lonely moor.

He shook his head at them.  “Please,” He asked. “Please don’t wait for me, anymore.”

The sun fell behind the horizon.

They stood alone.

“Well, that was heroic,” Someone scoffed.

Marc dropped into the clearing from the bough of the largest tree.


	24. Chapter 24

**Chapter 24**

  
  


“You disapprove of his sentiment?” Asked Taru, forger’s steel in her voice.

“No,” Marc said, running his eyes over them one by one and dismissing them.  “Vale is the master of theatrics. How better to make us strive all the more, than making it clear he is defeated without our help?”

“You said you would save him, but you are too late.  He is gone. You just sat and hid and watched us lose,” Lewis said.

“What are you doing here?” Dani asked.

“Give me back my spells, you blackguard!” Nico demanded.

The boy ignored all of them.  He turned his back and looked up at the mountain through the trees, back muscles tense beneath his shirt.

“We’ll keep Alex safe, regardless of what you do,” Colin murmured.

Marc looked over his shoulder.  “Thank you for that,” He said softly.

“I’ll make sure he’s safe!” Lewis started forward, “Safe in his own private box dimension, a meter on every side.”

With a wave of his hand, and a sigil draw in the air, Marc drew lines of fire around Lewis, preventing him from moving.  Surrounding him in a fence of live fire.

He stepped past the place Vale had disappeared, and touched the outcrop of the stone of the mountain.  He threw his head back and called, “I offer a deal. I bring the spells of a dozen grimoires. For the chance to take his place!”

A voice, high and taunting, laughed.  “We accept. You will take his place, serving in our lands, but no summer walking among men will be yours.  The grimoires will be the cost you will pay, and the talent from your bones.”

Marc shrieked.  He tried to pull his hand back from the stone, but it was stuck, fast, melted to the bones of the mountain.

Nico rushed forward, his healer’s instincts driving him to help, to alleviate the pain.  Then he realized Marc’s hand was NOT melted to the stone. His memory of Mick’s pain was still fresh, but what was taking Marc was very different.

He was being taken.

The mountain was pulling his hand deeper, consuming him.  His entire hand had been drawn into its surface. He was no longer shrieking, but he was struggling to pull free.  When he pressed his other hand to the stone to lever himself out, his other hand, too, began to sink into the stone.  The more of his body the Faeries took, the faster he sank.

He turned, face pale.  “Help me!”

They stood, unmoving.

“Dani!” He screamed.  His feet were being drawn in, now.

His mentor turned his head, side to side.  Just the barest denial.

“You have done this to yourself, Marc,” Taru said.  “We tried to content you, but you were so hungry for the powers you did not need.  Now, you are being paid for your work. There is nothing that can relieve you of that cost.”

His face broke into a grimace, and tears came to his eyes.  “Please! Give me another chance! They will never give me back!  Please! I will be trapped completely.” His struggles went on, like a fly in treacle.

“Maybe that will be easier,” Jorge said, “Easier to forget this world.  If you aren’t forced to come back.”

“I want to come back.  I want to be here! I was wrong.  I don’t want this deal. I want to stay with my family.  I will return the spells. Jorge, Cut me out of here. Lewis, put me in a box.”  His shoulders pulled, ineffectively, his arms not coming free even a centimeter. His eyes turned to Dani.

A battle mage had only one relief to offer one whose destiny was the elves.

Dani could only offer a painless death.

He watched his student with hard eyes and shook his head again.

Dani would not kill a man again.

Marc’s legs and torso had been consumed by the stone, now, and when he saw Dani’s denial, he wilted.  His forehead fell against the stone, and he did not struggle as the stone closed over him and sealed perfectly, unmarked by his passage.

They’d lost two.  In one strike.

The ground began to shake.

“The mountain!” Lewis yelled.

High up at the peak of the mountain, smoke was rising from the very stone.  Orange cracks appeared, and soon the orange spread over the surrounding rocks, the cracks burning yellow, and then splitting down, further and further down the mountain.

One of the cracks split down to reach the very ground, causing the air to wave with heat, and yet no heat reached them, and the inferno burned in silence.  The crack split into two around an outcropping of stone the size of two of their wagons.

The glow burned hotter and hotter, and then, with a rush, the top of the mountain burst in a rush of flame, a geyser into the sky.  The stones melted and fell away into the rushing firestorm, and in moments, where the edifice of stone had stood, a gout of fire rose as high.

All that remained of the mountain was the outcrop of stone before which Vale and Marc had disappeared.

Suddenly a noise like a million mosquitos, filled the air.  The sky rent open, like Nico had seen in the dreams, and a bare skinned man dropped through.  He hit the ground so hard he bounced, as though he had been falling for 10 years.

“Vale!” Colin shouted.  He leapt over the cart and dashed up the slope, falling to his knees pulling the coat from his body to wrap around the skinny mage.

Valentino pushed himself up on his elbows.

“He’s back!” Dani yelled in triumph.

He was back.

The sunken eyes and gaunt skin were gone.  He was strong of form and toned of flesh. He put his hand in Colin’s arm and they helped each other up.

As Valentino reached his feet, he inhaled a long breath.

“I can feel her,” He said, planting his feet in the loamy soil.  “Every pebble. I can feel her great iron heart, beating. Oh mother!”  He dropped to his knees again, kissing handsfull of earth. “I missed you.  I missed you.”

He communed for a moment.

Then he rolled to his feet again.  A smile broke across his face. It was like nothing Nico had seen.  Confidence, not of a trickster, but of a competent, powerful man.

He ran to Dani.  “I’m free, brother!”  He clasped the little mage’s shoulders and kissed both this cheeks.  “Daughter!” He ran to Taru and hugged her. He was smiling hugely, clapping Mick on the shoulders, embracing Jorge, who pushed him away with a grumpy noise, and embracing Nico and Lewis.  “Thank you both! Thank you. I can feel the Earth again.”

“We didn’t help you.  Marc took your place,” Lewis said, shaking his head.

“What will happen to Marc, now?” Nico asked.  “What will happen to all of us? He took those spells with him.  A dozen grimoires, Vale.”

“We will bring him back,” Dani said.

He and Jorge were standing beside the cart.  Jorge was pulling out cloth wrapped bundles.

“How?” Nico asked.

“Go and take him,” Jorge said, unwrapping the bundles to reveal beautiful sets of plate armor.

“We are warriors, after all,” Dani said, strapping a scaled breastplate over his colorful orange and red clothes.

Jorge put on a red tunic, a breastplate and strips of leather, all pieced with steel.  He added shoulder armor, and a large round shield. He put on a helmet, steel coated in bronze, that featured a blood red bristle, making him look like he had close cropped horse mane.  He checked a short, wide sword, with a rounded pommel.

Dani pulled on a helmet with three square sides around his head, and a long red pheasant feather.  He carefully unwrapped a matched pair of swords, with a slight curve to the face of their blades, and long, straight handles.  He strapped these, sheathed, to his side, along with a selection of knives of similar design.

“We are going to fight?” Nico asked.  None of the others was performing any sort of display, and the cart was emptied, with Dani and Jorge’s armor bound onto them.

“No.  You will stay here, and help Valentino,” Dani said, checking his straps, one by one.  “Jorge and I will fight. It is who we are,” He straightened with a smile and held his wrist up.

“It is what we do,” Jorge agreed.  He touched the silver bracer moulded around Dani’s wrist and it fell away into nothing.

With no further words, they turned and walked to the last remaining stone.  With a smile shared only with each other, they each raised their swords. The blades were thrust into the stone, and there was a flash, and both were gone.

Again, the remaining travelers were silent.

Colin crossed the clearing and threw a hug around Valentino.  “I missed you,” He said.

The pleased smile spread across Valentino’s face again.  “I am ready. We will finish the work we intended.”

He turned to Nico and Lewis.  “Are you ready to return home?”

Lewis took Nico’s hand and drew him forward.  “We want to remain with you.”

“We want to travel, and learn,” Nico agreed.

Valentino laughed, “Of course you will.  There will be nothing left for you there, once I have broken the Seven Towers.”  He walked past them, drawing his family with him, unerringly toward the camp of his people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Development is-
> 
> A) Stupid  
> B) Boring  
> C) Good  
> D) Exciting  
> E) Making me want more
> 
> What do YOU think Valentino is going to do to destroy the Seven Towers?
> 
> What will happen to Marc, Dani and Jorge?


	25. Chapter 25

**Chapter 25**

  
  


Nico and Lewis followed Valentino and the group.  There wasn’t much else they could do. That silent eruption was still carrying on behind them, and would be, indefinitely, until someone came to replace the fire mage who’d given his power for prolonged life in a Faerie Arcadia.  

They had no way to get past the stone barrier without Mick to open it.  Neither of them could control lightning.

“How is Mick going to face opening the circle again?” Lewis asked, putting voice to Nico’s worries.  “His hands are still raw.”

The traveling folk at the camp greeted Valentino returning with shouts and embraces.  Nico and Lewis slipped around the side of the group to their wagon. They started a fire in the camp stove.  Neither of them felt like eating with the group tonight. There would surely be celebrations.

Nico took the bucket and the water skin and left the wagon to fill them at the stream.  He heard the cheers grow quiet. Someone must have noticed the missing men.

No one but Alex had known what Marc had done.

A blur went past Nico at a run and disappeared into the red wagon behind theirs.  Tatiana, he thought. He shook his head and continued towards the stream.

They had expected to leave Valentino behind, break camp in the morning and return to their routine of 10 years of trading back and forth between the mountains and the sea.

Nico walked down the little gully where the water poured from some spring at the top of the hill, and away into a small lake at the bottom.  He didn’t think about where the water came from or where it went. The pond should have filled to overflowing, but this was an unnatural place.

The stream was much shallower, and the water was tepid when he touched it.  He looked up at the towering inferno above the tops of the trees. This place would be changing to reflect it’s new occupation, soon.

“Nico!”

He turned to see Lewis on the edge of the wagons, waving at him.

“We’re leaving,” He said, taking the bucket from his brother and walking back to the wagon.  The smouldering smoke of their camp stove fire had already stopped blowing from the stovepipe.

“It’s almost night,” Nico objected.

“Valentino said everyone needs to be ready to leave.  We are going.” Lewis flung the contents of the bucket onto the grass at the side of the camp, but Nico carried the waterskin on.

They packed quickly, as they had learned from months of travel, and fastened their belongings in place in the cupboards or alongside the box of the wagon with straps.  Valentino was on the seat of his wagon, with Colin standing beside the horses. For the duration of the trip through the mountains, Valentino had not felt strong enough to drive, but now he was returned from the elves, healthy again.

He waited until the last traveler had mounted the last wagon seat, and led the wagons down the hill.  He was setting a brutal pace and the horses would be exhausted LONG before they reached the top of the switchbacking pass if they kept this up.

They reached the stone circle, and instead of crossing directly to the ramp Mick had opened the day before, Valentino drove his wagon left, along the circle, nearly as far as the little lake.  

The mountains here rose jaggedly from the ground, with no way to pass.

Valentino stopped, with the line of wagons stretching behind his, in the center of the great spread of the stone circle.  He signaled everyone to stay in place, and got down.

He looked back at Colin, and further back at Mick and Taru and smiled.

Then he bent and drew a circle on the stone with his hand.  Where his touch passed, glowing lines were left behind. The circle was less than a meter wide and he marked it with runes.  Then he stepped into the center and the glowing circle rose off the stone and hovered around him, until it was even with his ribs.  He reached out and touched one of the runes. Pushing it like he might push a stone across a table, he pushed the rune along the edge of the circle.  He touched another rune and it turned in his hand like the handle of a door.

There was a deep, “chunk” noise they could all feel through the ground, even from their wagon seats.  Then the ground rocked, suddenly unsteady.

Nico’s breath was taken as a sensation, akin to falling, pressed him down against the seat of the wagon.

Instead of falling, they were rising.

The stone of the circle had separated from the segment beyond Valentino’s circle, and moved, had reared up like an enormous snake, with the line of wagons on the flat and the stone of the circle curving down behind them until it reached the ground, where it lay as it had before.

There was a rush of wind and Nico saw the ground dropping, getting smaller, as the stone lifted them 30, 50, 100 meters in the air, and more.  They were higher than the slope of the haha, but nowhere near as high as the peak of the mountain had been, and they were nowhere near as high as Marc’s memorial burned, now.

“Hold!” Valentino called.

He reached behind him and touched a rune, and the stone shaft they were riding on, began to move again, like the snake turning to the side, head remaining perfectly flat, the stone swivelled, until the stone of the mountains was before them.

Valentino stroked a hand over another rune, and the shaft of stone moved forward, with a great sense of motion, but very little apparent speed.

There was a ledge on one of the mountains, of a height with them, and the stone reached out until it touched together with the ledge, leaving a smooth surface onto what Nico could now see clearly was a great cobblestone road, wider than any building he had ever seen, even the inns in the largest towns they had passed through.

A highway even wider than the foot of one of the Seven Towers.

“Colin,” Valentino called, holding perfectly still, “Lead the caravan onto the mountain.  I will join you.”

“Yes, Magus,” Colin answered.  He looked to each of the wagon drivers, and then got in the seat of Valentino’s wagon and urged the horses forward.

They were surprisingly calm in the face of this venture.

Others were not.

Lewis groaned.

He was pressed back into the seat of the wagon, hunched low, and his eyes fixed firmly on the door of the wagon in front of them.  He had unconsciously transformed his hands into claws which were digging into the wooden edge of the seat.

Nico looked down.  The land of the valley was far below them, and he could see the pond the stream fed, and gully where the stream had run.  The stream didn’t seem to be running anymore, and the lake was quickly drying to a muddy pond in a damp depression in the ground.  As he watched, a line of something bright appeared in the gully as it passed out of the forest. It looked like fire, but was moving with the consistency of molasses.

It oozed down the gully and where it had touched the vegetation that hung over the banks, they had begun to smoulder.

There was already smoke rising from the trees where the gully must have reached what had been the mountain.

This place was shortly going to be very different.

“Look at this, Lewis,” He said, “There is fire running in the stream.”

“No,” Lewis said.  “Just drive the wagon.  I am not looking at anything until we are on the ground.”

“We are on solid stone.”

Lewis turned slowly, with a look of horrified disbelief.  When he realized beyond Nico was nothing but yawning air, and distant mountains, he snapped his attention back to the wagon in front of them.  “No, Nico,” He said firmly, “Solid stone does not rise up off the ground and thrust you about.” He moved his head to demonstrate this, and his hands stayed gripped to the seat.

“I think it’s incredible, and it was fun,” Nico said, tutting at the horses and urging them to follow their brethren onto the road.

“Fun,” Lewis scoffed.

They drove the wagons past Valentino, a long way, so the first wagons had begun to move out of sight around the ridge of the mountain, and the last wagon stopped well away from the open space where the stone of the former circle touched.

Colin walked rapidly back past them, and Nico got down and followed him.  He saw the stone HAD risen up like a snake, and below, it had torn the earth pulling itself free, there was a regular depression, like was made when a stick was left to be overgrown with grass and plants and then pulled up, leaving bare soil riddled with pale roots and grubs.  Nico was glad he didn’t see anything from this distance, burrowing down into the earth, but he wouldn’t have been surprised to see tremendous potato bugs’ grey backs burying themselves after being disturbed.

Valentino was still standing in the center of the glowing circle, touching runes.  He seemed far away and small, as they stood where the cobbles touched the silver wired granite.  “Stand back from the edge,” He called, “I drove it into the mooring too hard, and it is old. Some may fall when I move the manifold away.”

Colin held a hand out like a mother keeping a child back from a stream, and backed up, pushing Nico until they had an easy 10 meters between them and the edge.

The man standing alone on the stone looked even smaller, now.

He coiled himself, like a spring, and pushed the first rune back into its original position.  The glowing circle began to settle back down around his feet. At the same time the stone unsealed itself from the ledge.

He leapt over the circle, even before it had finished lowering to the ground, and landed running.  The stone was pulling away from the road.

There was a gap opening between the two and, indeed, as the stone that had been the circle pulled away, bits of the ledge fell free and tumbled into the widening space.

Valentino came to the edge of the stone, put on a burst of speed, and at the last possible solid step, he jumped.

The stone continued to swivel away behind him, and bits of the ledge on the traveler’s side continued to crumble away.

He landed on the edge of the cobbles.

His weight caused them to give way.

Nico saw the look of shock on Valentino’s face as he fell out of sight.

Colin started to run forward, but Nico caught his shirt, fighting and tripping him.  They both landed on the stones hard. Nico pinned Colin down, pressing his full weight on his legs.  They looked up to see another portion of the ledge, this one as wide as the road and as deep as a horse’s stride, sink and fall away into the sheer drop.

The man beneath him made a noise Nico had only heard once, when one of the mothers in the village had lost her beloved oldest child.

A noise with no expression but grief.

He made it again, louder and longer this time, and his fire spread around them, catching Nico’s hair and blackening the edges of Colin’s shirt.    Nico scrambled up and away. Colin might be immune to fire, but Nico was not. The fire singed the cobblestones, burning away tiny plants and the dust and leaving them scoured.

“I’ve got him!” Cried a strained voice.

Nico turned to see Lewis, hands outstretched, shaking.

A hole opened in the air and a scream sounded.

For the second time that day, Valentino dropped out of nothing and hit the ground.  A huge splash of water and mud came with him.

He lay panting amidst chunks of muddy soil and cobbles.

Colin was running to him, gulping smoke, but still issuing a tongue of flame with every exhalation.

Valentino pushed himself up into a seated position.  He was soaking wet and gritty with mud. He pushed his wet curls off his face, his yellow bandana had been lost somewhere along the way.

Nico looked back at Lewis in shock.

“You dropped him into a pocket hole.  And put the other end here.”

Lewis took a breath.  “I never thought I could have made one that big, but when I saw what HE,” He waved a hand at Valentino, “Could do with the mountains, I thought...I’m thinking too small.”

“Why did it take so long for him to appear?” Nico asked.  “A pocket hole opens directly from one place to another.”

“Well he’d been falling by the time I got the hole open, if I opened a hole below him and he hit the road, he’d be just as dead as if he hit the bottom of the mountain,”  Lewis walked to the edge, testing to make sure the remaining ground was solid. He pointed down.

The circle had set itself down again in its original place, and except for some raw earth around the edges where dirt had fallen into the suddenly open space, it seemed exactly as it had.  It was even impossible to tell where it had come unjoined.

To the right of where they stood, the lake was now almost completely dry.  “I dropped him in the lake to slow him down, and then I opened another pocket hole right below him, and he and the water fell out, here.”

Valentino covered his face and began to laugh.  “I thought I was gone,” He bellowed, face going red with relief.  “I thought, after all this, I am never going to leave this damned pen, after all.”

He jumped up.  He grabbed Lewis into an embrace.

“Once we free you from the Seven Towers, and you can use the whole of your Talent, you will be a tremendous mage.”  He leaned back with a considering look. “How far can you open one of these...pocket holes?”

“Because it’s like a hole in your pocket, but without the pocket,” Nico explained the name.

“I don’t know.  I only ever tried about 50 feet until yesterday.  “Last night I filled the bucket from the lake while I was in camp.  That’s about 10 klicks.” Lewis said, sounding bemused.

“I can see the effort tired you,” Valentino said, holding Lewis’ shoulders.  “You couldn’t open a way to get all of us to the Seven Towers, could you?”

“Why are you so intent on destroying our home?” Nico demanded.  “The high mages have never done anything to you!”

“No, I suppose we will have to travel the usual way,” Valentino said, as if Nico had said nothing.  “A shame. I would have liked to have cut some of the travel time.” He turned and tapped Colin with the back of his fingers.  “Still, it will be nice to travel on a proper road, for a way.”

“Valentino!” Nico grabbed his arm, hard, and pulled him around so they were face to face.  “Tell me why you want to destroy the high mages!”

Valentino pushed Nico’s hands away, eyes hard.  “I have been hospitable to you, have I not? Show me some decent respect.  Have you learned more since you have been with me than in the last years of your training in your towers, or have you not?”

“Answer me.”

He looked out to the valley, with the column of fire.  “I am a high mage, Nico. I don’t hate them. I have not said I will destroy the high mages, or even hurt them at all.  The Seven Towers is another matter. Nico, you understand many kinds of plants.”

“Yes.  Herbs and healing plants.”

“And other kinds?” Valentino asked.  “The strange and wonderful?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever heard of a honeypitcher plant?”

“It’s a plant with a flower like a pitcher about the size of my hand.  It is filled with liquid that smells sweet. Insects climb in to eat the liquid, and they can’t get out.  They drown in the liquid, which is like stomach acid, and the plant digests them,” He recited, exactly like this was a lesson back at home.

Valentino nodded like a teacher pleased with a student.  “That is what your Seven Towers are, Nico, but what they are feeding on is Talent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you trust Valentino?
> 
> A) Yes  
> B) Some parts may be true  
> C) No  
> D) Throw stones and run away


	26. Chapter 26

**Chapter 26**

  
  


“Around the sea in Conroe, they had honeypitcher plants the size of real pitchers,” Colin said, “Great way to get rid of rats.”

He passed Nico and Lewis on his way down the horse picket line.  He was being trailed by Alex. The 15 year old didn’t seem to know what to do with himself, now that his brother was gone.  Colin had been teaching him to train horses.

“I still don’t believe what he said,” Nico muttered, brushing the piebald mare.

Lewis was watching the way the firebreather approached the horses.  The brown ones he had lent them when they had first arrived. “He’s got some eye for horses,” Lewis said.  “Did you know he traded for every horse here, himself? All the ones the caravan has had for the last 15 years?  And have you seen him ride, he’s probably the best horseman I’ve ever seen.”

“I meant I don’t believe Valentino about the Towers.  That can’t be happening.” Nico put his brush in the bag and got out another, softer brush and started on the horse’s legs.

“The farther we’ve gotten away, the stronger we’ve gotten,” Lewis said.

“Practice,” Nico dismissed.

“Nico, we never USE our talents out here, for little things like we did back there all the time.  We’re practicing less than we ever did, and I’m not talking about learning new things like grounding ourselves.  Remember when Tatiana’s little brother fell off that crate and broke his arm? And you just walked up and said words to it and he was fine?  Do you think you EVER could have done that, back at the towers? Are you telling me that’s because you are breathing the wind and not because you are just plain stronger?”

“I was studying the grimoire,” Nico shook his head.

“I studied grimoires.  I can tell you I could NOT, not pushing with everything I had, have opened a pocket hole 3 meters across.  Not there. Here, it was easy.”

“I don’t KNOW why.”

“Father is considered one of the greatest mages, and I don’t think he has EVER done anything with the raw power it took Mick to open that circle.  I’ve heard stories of mages doing things like snapping their fingers and building a palace from the air, but I thought it was mundanes telling stories, because what we do seemed that far fetched to them.”

Lewis gestured at the road.

It was a little narrower, maybe 20 meters across.  Still cobbled, and with a neat stone wall, chest high to a tall man along every span of it.  Here the mountain notched in and there was a wide terrace. It was clearly overgrown and had once been lawn.  A little stream cascaded from the rocks above, ran down a stone channel, and dropped to fill a wide trough where all their horse had been watered.  Then it drained through a grate set to keep the water from overflowing, into another channel that dropped out of sight. On the other side of the road, it rushed out of another grate, down the slope and continued on its course, down the mountain until it joined the shining steel river in the depths.

The plants that had grown over were an ancient apple tree, and a great bed of mint.  Nico suspected the mint had once been sectioned off into the crumbling remains of a great pot that stood in one corner of the raised stone planting bed.  The floor of the terrace was grass gone to seed.

“I don’t think a palace is far fetched anymore,” Lewis said.

“He explained that he didn’t make all this personally,” Nico said, as if the fact made it any less astonishing.

“No, just the mountain range, all imbued with the spells so other mages COULD do this,” Lewis looked back to Alex.  The night before he had summoned the wind to power a turbine that had lowered a bridge over a canyon so deep they couldn’t see the bottom for the mist.

Nico looked down.  He brushed the horse’s legs carefully, and didn’t say anything.

“I don’t want it to be true, either,” Lewis murmured after a moment.

“But it is true, isn’t it?” Nico asked.

“Yeah.  I think it’s true.”


	27. Chapter 27

**Chapter 27**

  
  


The highway was untraveled.  It didn’t go anywhere but the drop off to the valley.  Still, Nico wondered where the other end lay. He had never heard of a highway through the mountains.  Nothing they had seen indicated that one existed. All those little villages clinging to outcrops, like the goats they survived on.

The terraces were spaced every 20 klicks.  They were placed to take advantage of the angle of the sun, so the plants would not be killed by the high shade.  Nico had taken to sitting beneath the fruit trees and imagining the terraces as they would have been. Neat lawns with wide boxed gardens overflowing with herbs and vegetables.  Some of them had not been consumed by the notoriously invasive mint. There were ancient vines that sported courgettes the size of his forearm, berry bushes that had climbed the sunny side of the cliff and sat over a spill of rubble they had pulled down over the years.

The berry bushes were still growing fat dark clusters of berries, even this late in the season and the children weren’t the only ones that had to be kept from gorging themselves on the sweet, sweet berries.  The pale skin of Nico’s hands and mouth were stained with red darker that the best wine.

They picked for hours and still there were more berries than they could harvest in a week, and the bushes rose 3 or 4 spans over Nico’s head, even when he stood on the largest piece of rubble in the moraine.

There were even apple trees.  They were well known as being toxic to humans, but the children picked them and fed them, with great delight, to the horses.  They washed their hands carefully in the streams afterwards.

These terraces, half a day’s journey apart, would have been gardens, providing travellers with the certainty of food and water.  They would have made traveling easy and safe, like it rarely was for the caravan. He had watched Valentino sit high up on the cliff, on a little ridge where he had climbed, fearlessly, pulling Colin behind him, and they were eating berries from their own private supply no one else could reach, and singing songs.  Nico had heard Colin play and sing, but never heard Valentino join in, even on the nights when the traveling folk put on a dance for a village.

He was very different than he had been in the months of the summer.

They left the last of these terraces and rode, ever west, towards the foothills, the plains, and the Seven Towers beyond.

The highway, for the first time, began to level out.  They had been travelling on a slow descent ever since they’d joined it at the valley of Marc’s monument.  At the head of the line of wagons, Valentino leaned down to where Colin walked beside him. Nico, also taking a turn to walk while Lewis drove, since they were on an easy route, everyone who could was walking again, had an excellent view.

For the first time they stopped their wagons in the road, with at least 10 klicks until the next terrace could be reasonably expected.

Valentino jumped down from the wagon and he and Colin walked back along the line to where the spare line of horses waited patiently at the rear of the group.  They unlashed three horses and Valentino came back to speak to Nico, while Colin blanketed and saddled the horses from beneath the last wagon, where he had put Alex in charge of the care of the spare horses.

“Come with me, please, Nico.”  He waved a hand at Lewis, “Yes, I know, where one brother ventures, the other must accompany, but for this time, just Nico, please.”

Sometimes, he had noticed, when he expected Lewis to resist, his brother accepted Valentino’s decrees, with no more than an incline of his head.  This was one of the times. Lewis said nothing.

“I’m sure you can be relied upon to carry all that you see back to share accurately,” Valentino told Nico.

They mounted the saddled horses, and Colin rode with Nico between himself and Valentino.  They followed the road and the clipping sound of horse hooves echoed among the stone walls of the mountains.  The ride was much shorter than Nico expected. They rounded less than a dozen ridges and the highway split, the highway carrying on around the next ridge.

The other branch of the road ascended between two mountains to a huge open, flat space.

When Lewis had mentioned the legends of mages snapping and palaces appearing, the image in Nico’s mind had been a grey, cold, tall fortress rising from the living stone, like vines sprouting from a garden.

Part of him had thought of the beautiful pictures of white, turreted, crenelated palaces found in tapestries and woodcuts.  The imaginings of mundanes who could not understand that a nobleman put up a castle as a stronghold against attacking armies.  They were always colonnaded and open and as secure as a courtyard library in a windstorm.

The were never cut of native stone from the mountains, hewn together in great hard, durable blocks, with windows only as wide as needed for a bow shot, with parapets not for lonely princesses to gaze at the moon, but for catapults to hurl death onto invaders.  They never had villages grown up around their walls, pigs in the streets, and the industry required to support the people who must work and maintain those strongholds.

The structure sprawling across the open saddle between the two mountains looked as though someone who understood the need for villagers and pigs had built one of the tapestry picture castles.  Someone had made each of the stores and houses as lovely and carefully crafted as the great tall structure that would have been impossible without calling it from the pale granite of the living stone.

This city in the clouds had been built to be beautiful and to serve the needs of actual people.  Like the highways that served it.

Nico watched Valentino’s face tighten.

Someone had cut the stone from the surrounding mountains, the ones with the dark brown stone veined with silver wire, and barricaded the city, knocked down lovely buildings, blocked stunning walks and used the rubble to build walls across what had clearly been parks.  To build guard towers and a great square stronghold.

Now it was a horrible, crippled hybrid, and an unassailable fortress.

Valentino’s forward progress never slowed.  He rode his horse forward to the gate. A guard hailed them.

For a place that should have been bustling, it was eerily quiet.

“Call your lord,” Valentino called.  “Tell him the lord of the mountains comes in peace.”

The man leveled his crossbow at them.

Valentino uttered a word and fingers of stone grew out of the wall the man was standing on and wrapped around him, knocking his crossbow from his hands.  It fell 10 meter from the top of the wall to the stone beside the gate and smashed.

“Are you taking it upon yourself to declare war for him?” He asked in a low voice that reverberated through the stone like he was speaking into a tin horn.  “Against the mountains?” He continued in a bemused voice.

“No, Magus,” The guard squeaked.

“Good.  I do so dislike a social visit being turned into an occasion of state.”  Valentino uttered another word and the fingers of stone released the man who ran to deliver the message himself, disappearing down a ladder on the other side of the wall.  Soon another guard appeared. This one took his post and stood with a sharp salute.

Soon after that, the gate opened.

Ten men on horseback, in unpolished, but well repaired armor, and uniforms of striped dull green and grey waited on the other side.

Valentino kicked his horse to a canter.  “An escort will not be necessary, Captain,” He told the surprised soldier as the three of them passed.  “I am able to direct myself through my own capital.”

He waved his arm.

The walls in front of them moved out of the way like they had taken a quick step back.  Every house and barracks and shop between them and the steps of the palace lay exposed. The furnishing completely undamaged, but now exposed to the height of one story.  A very confused man holding a tray of breads stared down the tunnel at them from a now ride through bakery.

He hurried out of the way as the three horses charged through, tails flagged, and manes rushing in the wind of their passage.

As they approached the open area before the steps of the palace, riding through the final wall into the courtyard where a virtual army was barracked in tents, Valentino drew another rune in the air and thrust it forward.  It flew ahead of them until it touched the steps of the palace. They smoothed themselves into a ramp, up which the horses ran.

This gentle removal of obstacles continued until they reached a small hall.  It was empty but for tables laid with food and two footmen and a butler ready to serve.  The doors of the palace, Valentino had simply caused to open ahead of them, but the doors at the far end of this hall, he did not.  He reined his horse to a stop and dismounted, gesturing impatiently for Colin and Nico to follow his lead. 

He approached the tables with evident delight, rubbing his hands.  “Oh I haven’t eaten so well in a long while. Help yourselves, my friends, our host should be joining us shortly.”

The butler, an able looking man in his mid-forties, cleared his throat.  “The Magus is awaiting you in the throne room, if you would care to join him,” He said, bowing for the door.

So, there was a high mage here, too.

“Tell him I will accept his audience here,” Valentino said, not turning to look at the butler, and piling foods on a plate.  “Oh! Colin, you will love this! He picked up a plate things that looked like roasted orange walnuts and offered one.

Colin ate it from his fingers and his eyebrows raised.  “Wow,” He said softly, exhaling a needle of flame.

“Habaneros!” Valentino agreed, eating one himself and offering one to Nico, who could smell the heat of the spice and declined.  “I haven’t seen these since I was a boy.”

The butler schooled his face and disappeared through the door to the throne room.

Nico, a quick learner in some circumstances, had surmised that they were to be taking no notice of the expected forms of hospitality, and was helping himself to a plate of the richly prepared foods.  Everything smelled heavily spiced and he recognized almost nothing. He had a spoonful of something that looked like marmalade cream, but which turned out to be a spicy chicken sauce, and what he thought were slices of dried melon turned out to be some kind of flatbread.  Then he had a chopped vegetable salad and something gooey with cheese and a different, red sauce.

He didn’t know how long they would be allowed to eat before whoever was the lord here came to speak with them, but Valentino seemed unhurried, so he enjoyed himself.  He did not eat any of the roasted habanyeros.

Colin ate half a dozen, with every sign of enjoyment, and sampled all the spiciest smelling food from the table. He joked with the footmen, and complimented them on the delicious foods of their native land, and took their recommendations on what to try, offering them some and nodding at their gracious decline.

Then the door opened.  The butler returned. “The Magus insists you join him in the throne room.”

Valentino shrugged and waggled his fork.

“No.”

The butler gulped.

Valentino relented.  “I can see he’ll take it out on you if I don’t,” He said.  “Are you ready?” He asked Colin and Nico. Nico indicated he was at Valentino’s pleasure, and Colin pocketed the remaining habaneros.

“Please have some more of these brought to me,” He asked the footman, patting his pocket, “I’ll be out there.” He indicated the throne room.

They followed the butler through the door.

The room beyond was huge. It had intricate gilt and inlay on every surface, carvings and carefully painted statuary.  There were columns 12 meters high.

“Throne room,” Valentino scoffed.  “Banquet hall with a...badly installed dias.”

The room was also empty, but for a rather reasonable throne, with a man sprawled in it and a young man standing beside him.

“Are you sure you don’t want a habanero?” Colin asked as they hiked across the floor.  “They are delicious.”

“I think you’re only saying that because you are immune to fire,” Nico retorted.

Colin chuckled.

They finally reached the foot of the dias and flowed right up the three steps until they were standing before the man who was presumably the Magus.  He had one leg over one arm of the throne and his elbow on the other arm propping his chin on his fist. He had a bored expression.

He also had a beard.

Mundanes who think of mages with beards imagine them white and as long as their waist, or maybe, in the case of the more imaginative bards, trailing on the floor.  This affectation in stories was to indicate their great age and wisdom. This man appeared a few years older than Valentino, and his hair was brown and wavey, and his beard was only a finger's breadth, neatly trimmed.

Valentino tapped his foot twice and the dias sank to the same level as the rest of the floor, except for three places, where perfectly carved stone chairs remained, facing the throne at comfortable conversational distance.

The young man beside the throne looked shocked and offended.  He had stumbled when the dias settled.

The bearded man sat up straight.

Valentino, Colin, and Nico seated themselves on the stone chairs.  Valentino looked hard at the young man and then said, “Sit down, Aleix.  I’m sure you can provide your own arrangements.”

The young man looked at the bearded man, who cocked his head as if to say that HE didn’t care, and Aleix tapped his foot twice.

A stone chair sprang out of the floor and he seated himself in it.

“I see you’re free,” The bearded man said to Valentino.  He said it slowly, like he reciting something he’d been made to learn that he was particularly uninterested in.

Colin pulled another habanero out of his pocket and crunched on it.  He breathed a little wisp of fire.  "Ooh, lots of seeds in that one."

“Who are your companions?”  Fernando went on.

“Colin, of the Conroe Sea and Nico, foremost healer of the Seven Towers.”

He snorted.  “The legend says your dragon turned out to be an elf, it didn’t mention that it became tame and you made a pet of it,” He sneered at Colin.

Colin didn’t react.

A pet?

Dragon?

Valentino sat forward.  “I’m here to talk about the highways, Fernando.”

Fernando waved a hand.  “They were a tactical vulnerability.  Unsound battle principles. They had to be done away with.”

“The people can’t get around.  They can barely travel to and from the main road.  The main  _ footpath _ , I should say.  They can’t trade, they can’t reach half the pasturage.”

“I can hardly have troops marching up the passes straight into my capital.”

Valentino twitched.  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the villages getting smaller every year.”

“Oh every year is it?  Maybe I save up and decrease them every 10 years, just in time for what you have clearly been viewing as an inspection tour.”  Fernando said with a smug grin.

Then Fernando made eye contact with Valentino and Nico’s healer’s eye marked the blood draining from the bearded man’s face.   


“You,” He started, “Clearly have the talent back.  Are” He wet his lips, “you going to reclaim the city?  I’ve been holding it in trust for you.”

"Mmm," Colin hummed.  He licked pepper juice off his fingers.

Something about his fear made Nico feel good.

“Not at this point.  I have the key to the Seven Towers and I’m going to deal with a bigger issue than your...assistance in maintaining my capital.  I will be gone for the winter, and I will be back in the spring. The complete replacement of the highways as they formerly ran through the passes,”

Fernando paled at the amount of work that represented.

“Is too big a task for you to undertake during the winter, though I am pleased to see you have equipped yourself with a reasonably competent earth mage.”  He turned to Aleix. “It is good to see you, Aleix. I assume your brother is with you?”

“He is,” The younger earth mage answered, with none of the deference of the servants showed, and none of the fear the Magus showed.

“I’m happy to hear that.  I will be back in the spring to check your progress.  It is most important that the far villages are reached and given adequate means to travel.  I trust you won’t object to this, Fernando, since villagers having access to resources and commerce will not put this…” His mouth twisted in distaste, “Fortress, at any tactical disadvantage, and in fact their being able to make trade might just make my lands profitable, as they have not so far been, under your capable trust.”

He stood and Nico and Colin followed his lead.  Aleix stood with them, and grudgingly, Fernando stood.  Valentino led them away, leaving the dias flattened and the chairs facing the throne as they were.

“When I return,” He said as they marched across the floor with their backs to Fernando, “We will speak about the disgusting mess you have made of my city, and I will advise you on reparations.  Until then, it may remain as it is. I sympathize with the importance of a defensible base of operations to a battle mage.” He waved his hand and the doors opened, twisting back so far they peeled the wall back with them to either side, leaving a rent opening that ran the width of the room on the other side.

Their horses looked up in interest at the sudden open space.  The footmen were cowering behind the tables. As the 3 travelers passed, one of the footmen got up his courage and handed Colin the silver tray he had been about to carry through the door.

“Thank you!” Colin reached for the tray and then realized he would have no way to carry it while riding the horse.  “Oh...Can you help me with this, please?”

“Here, M’lord, take this,” The other footman exclaimed, emptying a cloth bag of warm bread into another bowl.  They layered the habaneros in napkins and tucked them in the bag.

“Thank you, gentleman,  I will remember your kind service when the lord Magus’ business brings us back this way.”  He mounted his horse with an easy grace and nodded to the footmen.

Valentino opened the doors of the palace and they rode through again in the other direction, the doors closing behind them as they went.  They rode unhindered to the city gate, the walls sealing themselves in their previous forms after they had passed. They left the city just as it had been, except abuzz with activity and talk.

The mage stopped outside the gate and addressed the guard who had replaced the man Valentino had sent with the message.  “I am Valentino, high mage and lord of the mountains. I have granted this city in trust to Fernando, battle mage of the Ovado.  When I return, I will be treated with the respect due my station. I take no tithe and demand no fealty, only respect.”

After saying this he turned and rode his horse away at a walk.

They rode three ridges away and then Valentino stopped again and got off his horse.  Colin was sitting rigid in his saddle.

“Colin, get down.”  Valentino held his hand out.  “Come here.”

Colin’s jaw was locked.

He didn’t move.

Valentino patted his leg.  “I’m getting impatient. Get down.”

Colin looked down at him.  The tendons in his neck were straining.

“Get off that horse, NOW,” Valentino said, urgently, grabbing Colin’s arms and  _ pulling _ him off.

Colin’s hands were fisted.  “He said,” He ground through still clenched teeth.

“I know, he was trying to make you angry.”  Valentino put his arms around Colin’s shoulders, pressing Colin’s back to his chest..

“He called me,”  He was shaking.

Valentino walked him, taking big, swinging steps to keep from stepping on each other’s feet, over to the wall at the edge of the road.  “Alright, let it out.”

“I AM NOT.  A . PET.” Colin screamed the words and the air burst with heat.

Nico covered his face with his arm.  The horses nickered and stamped. They edged against the far wall, away from the searing blast.  Valentino had been sensible to take the fire breather to face the empty air, because even so, the rage had expressed and scoured the stone, leaving melted patches.  Valentino’s arms across his chest, were forming into welts even as the heat dissipated into the cool of the mountain air.

Valentino rested his head on Colin’s back.  “Of course you are not. He told the most vicious lie he could think of, because he knew hurting you would hurt me.  I am sorry he said it.”

Colin’s head drooped.  “I’m not a pet.”

“I know.  No one could tame you.”  He loosened his grip and then let it fall when Colin turned to face him.

Nico could see the resemblance, now, in his narrow face, and the shape of his nose.

“I’m sorry about your city.  It looks like it was marvelous,” Colin said sadly.

Valentino nodded.  “It was. We will see it restored.”  He examined his friend's eyes. “You both made me proud,” He raised his voice to include Nico.  “I expect you to tell Lewis everything you saw here, today, both of you. I couldn’t take more than two companions, or the insult would have been too much for Fernando to bear, but I will want Lewis’ input.  I think he will understand a man like Fernando. I want someone who will be able to take him apart if the need ever arises.”

He smiled at Colin and received a smile in return.

“Good man,” He murmured.  He led him back and they both remounted their horses.  “This is the time I will regret the necessity of Dani’s absence.  No one understands Fernando’s mind better, and I would like someone on my side who has already beaten him so soundly.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A) Valentino WOULD build a fairy tale castle  
> B) Valentino Wouldn't build a fairy tale castle  
> C) Why did Fernando let them just ride in there like that?  
> D) Those footmen were really impressed with Colin  
> E) Hey, look! Aleix!  
> F) Colin snaking on habeneros while Valentino teabags Fernando is the best scene in the whole story.  
> G) Wait...Colin is a dragon??  
> H) Yum, blackberries


	28. Chapter 28

**Chapter 28**

 

Nico approached the horse line.  The spare horses were sometimes rotated to the drafting duties, to keep them fresh to the task, but those who weren’t pulling needed exercise, regardless, and Colin was riding one and leading another, going a way up the road as they’d come and then bringing them back.  

“Would you like help?” Nico asked.

Colin pointed to the rearmost work wagon.  The work wagons held things like Jorge’s forging equipment and the spare saddles, that were too large to take a place in any one family wagon.  One carried the bulk of the stage.

Nico got out a saddle and fitted it on the horse he was directed to ride.  “I am sorry that man in the city...was so demeaning to you,” He said.

“Take the sorrel gelding to lead,” Colin directed.

When they were on flat ground, he had taken a long rope and had them walk, trot, and run in circles around them.   Here there wasn’t room. The highway was technically wide enough, but the horses disliked any portions of dashing towards the ledge, and Colin didn’t like them doing it, so he rode them every other day, exchanging which ran with which.

He put a blanket on the horse he was riding, a bay gelding.  “Valentino was right, he was just saying what he thought would make me angry, compromise our position and make Vale look weak.”

Nico smoothed the blanket on his own horse’s back.  “I did not realize you were the dragon from your story.”

Colin’s mouth dropped open.  Then one side of his face rose in a grin.  The other followed it, a moment later. “Ah.  No. No.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, that was a lie, too?”

The older man closed his mouth.  “He, Fernando, he was the warlord who displaced Dani’s people  It was him Dani went to war with.” He threw his saddle over the horse’s back.  “You knew my homeland was destroyed, in that war?”

Nico followed suit and nodded, “Yes, you said.”

“Conroe is a sea, but it’s also the lands around the sea.  A couple groups of folk all loosely connected, and all very dependent on the sea.”  They mounted up and started to walk their horses out of the camp, up the wide highway.  “Sailing is the most common trade. Most of us lived on ships, which would come and go, and lash together like floating villages.  Firebreathers are, not common, but by far the most common Talent adaptation, out there. They call us dragons. For obvious reasons.”

Nico rode close to Colin, with the horse he was leading on the far side, so he didn’t have to strain to hear.

“When the war came, both sides wanted the Conroe Seamen to fight with them.  The firebreathers and the ships. Ready built navy, you know, to carry goods and soldiers.  The thing is, those ships were trade ships, not warships, and they were carrying families. It’s like asking someone to barrack soldiers in your house while your children are living there.”  He looked down for a long time, “So they said no.” He swallowed. “And both sides battered them into the ground, any time they came across one of the ships. Women, children and all.” He looked out onto the mountains on the other side of the gorge where they rode.  “Eventually, they decided that wasn’t enough, and they scourged the sea, turned the waters to poison. They looked still looked like water, and tasted like water, but anyone drinking them, or washing in them, or eating the fish, would get sick and die. Eventually all the fish died, and all the plants, and now it’s just a huge dead swamp of poison water.”

“That man did that.”

“Yeah.  And Dani.”

Dani.

“Dani and I made our peace a long time ago.  I don’t feel sorry Jorge keeps him on that leash, and I don’t feel sorry he doesn’t get to go free.  I think there’s only so much one man can pay for all those lives, and doing the right thing will go a far better way to fixing things than him dying.”

“Why did he call you a pet?”

“Because the warlords used to catch firebreathers and put glass collars on them, so they couldn’t get hot,” Get hot was Colin’s way of explaining the bursts of fire when he became emotional or exerted himself hard.  “Then they kept them as slaves. They paraded them around to show how helpless they were. See, mages like that see everyone else, the mundanes and the other Talents, as less than them. Because they can make the weather change or control lightning, smith things with their hands, or do things that can change the course of a battle.”

“I’m sorry,” Nico said.

“So I’m not a dragon.  I’m certainly not the dragon in the story.  That was only a glamour the elf cast to make Vale think a dragon was stealing the girls from his villages.  Just a lure. There never was any dragon, just one filthy rotten elf.”

They rode in silence for awhile.

“How did you end up here?  I thought you lived with the traveling folk before the war.”

“I did.  I grew up on one of those ships, climbing rigging, casting knots, all of that.  We got stormwrecked. I was pretty small, I don’t remember, now, Not all the lands around the sea were as friendly to each other, and I ended up at one that was...not familiar.  They were good people, though. They saw what I was and even though they didn’t like magics, they were going to let me stay with them. Just about then, the caravan showed up, and Mama Taru and Babu Mick saw me, and realized I was going to fit with those folk like a hot coal in a hayloft.  They took me in. The folk were glad to get rid of me, I’m sure. Thing is, I was little, didn’t really know what was going on. I knew my family was gone, then there were these other folk, real plain clothes, real strict, but about different stuff, you know. Like I could swim before I could walk, but they were real concerned about letting me go down to the shore by myself.”  He snorted, “Coal in a hayloft. Anyway, then there was Mama and Babu, and they were like me, colorful and loud and moving around, cept it was in wagons. They still didn’t...understand ME, though.”

He took the opportunity to nudge his horse into a trot.

“Then one day there was this man.  We were out in the woods and he was out there, naked as a lie, and Mama Esther spanked me for going so far from camp, but he was at home when we came back, in my wagon with my Mama and Babu.”  A grin spread across his face at the memory. “He didn’t mind me sassing him, and Mama Esther always spanked me for sassing her or the other ladies. Mama told me he was a mage and he was important, but he never minded me talking with him, or showing me a thing or two that he’d learned.  I never knew he couldn’t do magic. Some of the stuff he could do looked like magic to me.”

The horses moved to follow him as he took them to a canter, then a gallop, and through their gaits back to a walk.  Then he resumed his story.

“One day he was gone, and I just accepted that for how it was.  People came into your life and then went. My parents, the folk on the sea, Vale.  When I was a little older, I found out he’d be coming back, but mostly forgot about it.  There’s a world of life between when you’re 7 and when you’re 17.”

His eyebrows drew in.

“When he came back the next time, I was having a lot of trouble.  I loved my family, but it seemed like there was things about me they just didn’t understand.  Vale came back, and by then I knew what a big DEAL he was. I remember that first day, I loved to ride and I had Dani with me, and Dani and Jorge and the rest of their kin had joined us, not too long before.  Been put out by Fernando’s army, like I said, and Dani’s mama was Mama Esther’s sister, and so they came to live with us. I didn’t have many kids my age, and little Ben was still, 6 or so, which is too little for a 17 year old to notice, but Dani and Jorge were 11, 12, just about old enough to be interesting, and I was being big brother, riding Dani around on this big paint I had trained to ride without reins.  Mama Esther was scared Dani was gonna fall off,”

Colin shook his head at the idea.  Riding without reins was advanced riding, if you’d learned with, and training a horse to it meant a high level of skill, Nico knew that.  He’d wondered at Colin’s horses taking to trick riding so easily. “I wouldn’t have let him fall off, he was like my little brother, and I never let him or Jorge or little Ben EVER fall off, but she yelled at me, something fierce, about how I was good for nothing and was never gonna grow up.”  Colin had a sick look on his face, like he could taste the feeling in his stomach when he remembered it. “And I look up while she’s saying all this, and I see Vale standing there, this big mage who everyone looks up to, watching me get horsewhipped, and I just never felt so ashamed in all my life.”  He gulped at the memory.

“And you know what he did?” He asked.

“He wasn’t ashamed of you?” Nico hazarded.

“He came and found me, and he told me he remembered me, and that he wanted me to come and help him out while he was with us for the summer.  He said he wanted to teach me some things every man needed to know.”

Colin looked down.  “And I told him I wasn’t a man.”

Nico looked at him, watched him eye the pommel of his saddle, he waited to hear what this meant.

“So he looks at the back of my hand, and he says, “Colly,”  Everyone called me Colly, back then, little lovename, and then he corrected himself and said, “Colin, do you need someone to help you perform the Rite of Sorccaron?””

He didn’t answer the question in the story, he just pinched his mouth tight and nodded.

“What is the Rite of Sorccaron?” Nico asked.

“Manhood ceremony.  I had no one to do it for me, and no one here knew anything about Conroe or the sailors or what it takes for a boy to become a man, for us.  I couldn’t...be a man, couldn’t see myself as a man, if I never went through the Rite.” He took a gusty breath. “He helped me, and made the mark on my hand,” He showed Nico the neat x shaped scar like other men might have tattoos, “And he told Mama and Babu that they needed to travel to the sea, sometimes, because it wasn’t right for me to grow up without anyone else knowing my ways.  He said it was a shame I had to wait so long to become a man, with no one to help me. And he spent that summer teaching me, about leading and about politics, and about what it means to be a man- taking care of your folk and always being brave, even when you’re scared so you’re as like as not to piss.”

He ran his hand over his bald head.  The hair was beginning to sprout again, and he was letting it grow, but it seemed to surprise him every time he touched it.

“You can’t know, what that’s like, for a boy who’s been set aside for that long, to have someone finally take notice of him, and finally treat him like he’s a man.  You said I cried when he left, and I’m not ashamed to say that I did. I was heart broken. I thought I was in love. I thought the sun rose and set on him.”

“And then he was gone,” Nico said.

“And then he was gone,” Colin agreed, “And we traveled the world again, but this time I was a man.  Then one day the soldiers showed up, and they killed Ezio, that was Tatiana’s father, and they killed Mama Esther.  Then they left us alone, and by morning Dani was gone. The next we heard he was fighting his way through the warlord’s forces in the north, gathering followers as he went.  Vale came back, but with no power there was no more he could do than the rest of us. I think he said something to Jorge, because after he left, Jorge was gone. Mama was half convinced he’d gone to kneel to Dani, but then the war ended and rumor was the warlord just vanished.  Jorge walked back into camp one day with Dani at heel, and Dani apologized to everyone, and it took Mama a lot of work to get everyone to agree to give him another chance, but everyone remembered the soldiers killing Ezio and Esther, and half the folk had been pretty glad someone had tried to stop Fernando, until the war came real for all of us and we were eating the horses and things like their poisoning the sea and chaining the fire breathers happened.”  He sighed.

“I had a long time once I’d become a man to learn about Conroe, and I wasn’t the only one.  Vale knew some of the ways of my folk from studying in his day, but by the time he came back, Taru and Mick and all the folk here, knew them better, and he was glad.  It meant they accepted me, wanted me and mine to be a part of them, like they were already a part of me. I learned they really did want me here, and I learned that there was more to life than just Valentino.”

“Of course.”

“When he came back, I was glad, and I still loved him, but like a man loves someone they respect and admire.  I thought he would be disappointed I wasn’t shaking in love with him anymore. Of course he NOTICED I’d been in love with him.”  Colin got red, “It’s hard enough to hide a tree in your camp at that age, without getting hot and setting the wagons on fire, too.  It was embarrassing, but he was always really calm about it. Never made me feel ashamed of what I was feeling. Then when he came back, I had better control, but damn I still wanted him.”

He laughed.  “He was even better that year.  Listened to me, treated me like I was worth listening to, took me back into his confidence.  And we…” He looked over at Nico, assessment on his face. “He didn’t want to handfast that year.  He knew he had at least one more stint with the elves, before he had a chance of coming back. He told me he wasn’t going to take 10 years from me for the sake of 6 months.  We were together, but he wouldn’t say the vows. I missed him when he was gone, but eventually I knew I was glad I wasn’t obligated to wait for him. I wasn’t useless for months, like I was when he left when I was 17.  I knew he wanted me to experience my life, and I trusted I would have him forever the next time. So I made good use of my time.”

“Did you find someone else to love?” Nico asked.

“Hmm?  No. But I didn’t hide from it, either.  I danced, and I kissed and I knew that if I found someone, I could be with them.  I just never found anyone who made me want to dance or kiss or be with them forever, and when Vale came back to me, this year.  I knew what I wanted, and he accepted that. I’ll tell you what, no matter what you’ve done before, your first night of lovemaking as a married man is like nothing else you’ll ever experience.  I never…”

He held his hands out, unable to explain.

Nico just nodded.  “I think I understand.  Not how it felt, but how significant it must be.”

The camp was coming back into sight.

“Colin,” Nico asked.  “Would you mind if I rode the next set of horses out with you?”

He looked surprised, “What, after I talked your leg off this whole way?”

“It was welcome to hear,” Nico said, “And I was hoping I could get some advice.”

“Oh?  I’ll help in any way I can.”

“About what you said, about making love as a married man.  I was wondering...if you could explain that...as it might apply to myself and Lewis…?”

“You really don’t know?” Colin asked quietly.

“No, I’m not sure.”

“Yeah, of course.  I will be happy to explain.”  He nodded solemnly.

Nico found the second portion of the ride extremely informative, then he went and asked Lewis to join them and they all rode out again, while Colin explained a second time, to a wondering audience.


	29. Chapter 29

**Chapter 29**

  
  


It was strange to pass on the way home again.  Each village they had travelled through on the way into the mountains, had once been the farthest Nico had ever been from his home.  Now they had crossed the iron pass, which seemed like a simple climb over a hill to him, now, and the wagons rumbled over the earthen road to the village of the Seven Towers.

They left the caravan in the village, safe at the foot of the hill.

Valentino checked the strap on Colin’s satchel, like one might check the saddle on a horse.  He stood for this, patient while his Mage made certain he was ready. Nico handed Lewis his warm cap.  The two brothers smiled at each other, nervously.

“Are you ready?” Valentino asked.  Colin, Lewis, and Nico nodded.

Colin breathed a stream of flame and set fire to a heap of dried leaves and flowers in a metal plate.  The fire burned pink with lots of popping sparks. Then the sound changed to a sizzling sound and it turned green.  When the tips of the flame had turned from pink to green, Lewis moved his hands over them in a mystical way.

“Alright,” Nico said, “It will take effect soon.”

They left the plate burning and Taru and Mick stood to guard it while the young men started the walk up the hill.

The Seven Towers were impressive structures.  Not called from the living stone, and not hewn by crude tools, the histories said they had been cut by someone’s Talent years before, each stone perfectly fitted, and a beautiful construction.  They were the color of ripe wheat, and were grown over along their sunny southern exposures with vines. They sat in an irregular semi-circle.

After some of the things Nico had seen, they didn’t seem so big.  All but the largest and smallest were 6 stories. The largest, flying a red banner with a horse rampant was seven, and the smallest, with a blue banner featuring a great wildcat in rose, was 5.

The leaders of each of them were standing among them, in a loose knot, waiting.

“Father!” Nico began.

Mika ignored him, never taking his eyes off Valentino.  “Valentino,” He said, openly glaring.

Valentino inclined his head and said nothing.  His yellow cloak danced on the breeze, and his broad brimmed hat cast unnatural shadows over his face.

“Word reached us.  It seems we are no longer to be rid of you, and your...ilk.”  His eyes drifted over Colin, Lewis, and Nico.

“Mages cannot afford to deny what they are, Mika.  You knew the cost, once.”

“It is mages like YOU who are the dangerous ones.  The mundanes hate us because you flaunt your power and make them afraid.  Your little warmonger and his petty vengeance destroyed the arable land for 100 klicks around the Conroe Sea.” He turned to Colin.  “Don’t you hate them for what they did? You aren’t like them, and they showed how little your ties mean, and now you follow them? He takes your honor by forcing you to subject yourself to him.  No fire breather survived, because they all preferred death to chains, and you...chain yourself to his words.”

Nico looked at Colin, he was looking at Valentino with new light in his eyes.  Nico himself was seeing things as clear as he ever had. Everything was as apparent to him as it had been the night he decided to run away and join the traveling fold.

“We don’t seek to dominate anyone,” Mika soothed.  “If you would like, we would be pleased to return you to your homeland, we would send a pair of weather mages with you, to help you heal your land.  There are still mundanes living on the outskirts of the devastated areas. Don’t you want to help them? Your people?”

Colin shook his head.  His eyebrows were drawn down and he watched Valentino with incredulity.

“He is lying,” Valentino said, “There is no way to recover the land within 10 generations.  He could send a thousand weather mages. The sea is poisoned. Dani told you what he did.”

“Maybe,” Colin growled.

“He is promising you lies, now stand beside me.” Valentino pointed to the ground at his feet.

“You are too honorable to be on this creature’s leash,” Mika told him.

“I am no one’s PET!” He seethed.  A sheet of flame burned a neat line in front of him, nearly burning Valentino’s bare feet.  Valentino didn’t move and didn’t look away from Mika. The firebreather backed away, moving to side with the Tower mages.

“Colin!  Do as you are told!” Valentino barked.

“You haven’t TAMED me, Valentino.”  He backed into the midst of the mages, like they would protect him from his friend.

“You stole him from his people.  He has a right to return to them.  They need his help more than you need his servitude.” Mika waved to two mages Nico recognized as weather workers.  He remembered that a few times, working together, they had produced rain. They guided Colin towards the tower flying the blue and green fox flag.

“I don’t STEAL anyone.  They come to me because they need something others cannot offer them,” Valentino said.  “Your sons came to me, because you were not helping them find their potential.”

“My sons are powerful mages. You have interrupted their training.  You have cost them nearly a year of their progress.” He turned to them with a beseeching expression.  “Lewis, we have made such great progress since you have been gone. New information has come to light. We have missed your help with our research.  Many nights we have regretted that you were not here, with your brilliant grasp of the dimensions, to explain a new understanding to us. It has been devastating, losing you, when you were so close to becoming a teacher.”

“A teacher?  You want me to teach?”  Lewis’ eyes lit up. “You think I’m ready.”

“Lewis, no!” Nico said.  “You said you believed.”

“How can I have been right?  They are making breakthroughs.  Without me. That disproves everything he told us.”

“You have made more breakthroughs since we have been gone than they have made in 10 years!”  Nico grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “You can cast enchantments they cannot believe! Remember the valley?”

“I can show them that, I can show them what I have learned and we can all learn together, I have to try.”

Mika held his arms open.  “Lewis, son, come home to your father and mother.”

Lewis’ breath caught.

He turned to Nico with hatred in his eyes.  “My FATHER loves me, and I’m a good son. I’m going to him.”  He pushed past Nico and embraced Mika.

“I’m so proud of my powerful mage,” Mika told him.

He hugged his mother, and she smiled hugely and led him towards the tower with the white bird banner.  “I am eager to show you our new spells, my son.”

“Don’t go IN there, Lewis!” Nico cried.

He turned to Valentino, who was still watching Mika.  Maybe for him, this was the same as the confrontation with Fernando, but for Nico, it was personal, and painful.  He wanted to strike out.

Instead he stood by Valentino.

“Nico,” Mika began.

“No.  You will not deceive me.  You never wanted me to study healing magics, you cannot make me think you have been longing to help me in my search for new herbs, or have suddenly gained new understanding of an art you consider worthless.  You turned me away. I will learn. A mage cannot deny his nature.”

Mika didn’t even argue.  “I see. Well, once we have satisfied your brother with a few morsels for him to chew over for the next few years, we will be able to keep him safe from the likes of you two.  He will understand that the best use of power is small, steady doses, and never anything more. That way the mundanes never need fear our works.”

“You really can’t see what is happening, can you?” Nico asked.

Mika looked mildly surprised.

Nico wrung his hands.

“Ready?” Valentino asked.  They both shifted their bare feet, grounding themselves to the earth.  “Tell me what you see.”

Nico’s magesight had been flaring since the burned catsbane had taken effect, about the time Colin had been insulted.  The world of the mundane was dark, but where there was power was rendered in bright, sensational colors. Valentino was a bright, green glow, drawing power from a great red throbbing deep within the ground that Nico couldn’t even bear to contemplate, and over his head floated the rune for earth.  Colin had been a flutter of orange fire, expanding and contracting with every breath and emotion. Lewis had been swirling silver and gold, with the twin runes for space and life twining and reforming around each other.

Mika and the other mages were weak and pale.  Their runes dim. As Valentino was drawing power from the Earth, Mika and the Tower mages were having power drawn FROM them, into their home towers.  When Colin and Lewis joined them, thin tendrils of their talents had begun whisping into the streams running into the Towers they had been joined to.  

The Towers that were controlling their minds.

The towers themselves were alive with light, like Dani’s faerie fire, but sickly yellow.  The yellow ill color crept up the streams to each of the mages. Some into the mages’ own hearts, and Nico saw that they could not survive much longer, now that the Towers had begun to digest them directly.

His stomach lurched.

His eyes followed the Towers down.

“The Towers aren’t stone!”  He called to Valentino. “They have ROOTS!”  He could see the twisting filaments, reaching down into the earth, drawing nutrients from the soil as well.

He could feel Valentino’s power drawing the stone of the bedrock up into range, forming it into sharp edges, getting ready for Nico’s command.

“Where are they weak, plant master?” Valentino asked.  “Tell me where to strike. Should I take the largest, first?”

“Valentino…” Nico’s voice was a whimper.

“What?” Valentino’s magesight was terrifically weak, and he had given Nico the lion’s share of the catsbane, knowing he would have to rely on his direction.

“They aren’t seven towers.  They are one. They are joined under the ground.”  He could see the pulsing yellow bulb joining them, and from this, more roots.

“Their roots are starting to break down the stones, plant master, tell me how to move!”

The mages, inexplicably, were standing, watching this exchange, unresisting.

When Nico focused on them, he realized the yellow had reached up inside every one of them, now, and it was drawing from them, getting ready to defend itself.

“Cut them off from the ground!” Nico screamed.

Valentino strained, drawing his arms up like he was lifting a wagon by the wheel.  The stones struck like axes, slicing along the ground. The roots, as roots do, had found every crack and imperfection, and dug into them, chipping pieces off the edges and blunting the cutting edges.  

The harder Valentino drove them into the thick woody stems of the Towers, the more pieces broke away.  He was panting. It was much more of a strain to force untrained stone to do his bidding. 

Suddenly Nico realized something.

He ran forward.  He burst through the door into the tower where Colin had been taken.  He found the man sitting with 3 unmoving mages. Colin looked exhausted, but his power was only being drawn from him, he was not being consumed directly.

He pulled Colin out and knelt him down beside the wall of the Tower.

“Valentino!” He screamed, “Concentrate on cutting this one.  If we can get him free he can help us!” He grabbed Colin’s face and turned the bleary eyed man to him.  He slapped the wall, which resounded with a wooden thud. How had he never before noticed they were not made of stone?  “BURN THIS, DRAGON!”

Little anger twitched to life in his face.  “Not dragon,” He slurred.

“This creature,” He slapped the wall again, “Has put a collar around your neck, and it is using it to make you do tricks.  It is making you its lapdog!” Nico screamed at him. “BURN IT!”

Colin’s face constricted, he pushed himself out of his slump.  “I am NOT a lapdog.” There was flame this time, like a torch.

When it touched the wall of the tower, the tower lurched.  They both looked up in shock, and then it lurched again as Valentino’s stones cut deeper into the stem holding it, underground, to the larger body.

Then the firebreather cringed, throwing his arms over his face.  “It’s hurting me.”

“It thinks you’re being a bad dragon.  It’s whipping you, Colin, to make you behave.”

Colin shrieked, and the flame licked up the side of the wall, leaving a scent of toast and a scorch.

“Are you going to be whipped, Colin?”

“NO!”  He was awake, now, and he drew in a deep breath.  His ribcage, his whole frame expanded.

Nico dove away, scrambled to his feet, and ran.  The fireball behind him rolled up the side of the tower, which twisted and shriveled, like a vine in the heat.  This time the flame was sustained, and it sounded like a high wind blowing over the mouth of a bottle. He felt the air move as Colin’s fire consumed the oxygen in the area.

He felt the earth move again and Valentino’s stone shards grew out of the deep bedrock to cut into the base of the tower, one, two, three in succession.  He ran towards a familiar wall, down a familiar path, into a familiar scullery. The workshop he had shared with Lewis had been left to dust. He stared in horror at the bare shelves.  He had forgotten he had taken all of the jars.

For a moment he froze.

Outside he heard Colin’s scream of rage, and cry of pain as the tower struck back at him.  He heard Valentino call encouragement, voice weak between breaths.

Lewis was in this Tower, somewhere, and Nico was going to cost him his life if he didn’t think.

His brother’s words came back to him.  The way Lewis had encouraged him as they stood here, before their lives had changed forever.  He moved his hands in the old familiar motion.

A pocket hole opened above his outstretched hand.

A jar fell into it.

Nico smiled.

“Thank you, Lewis,” He said.

He ran outside, staring at the ground, tracing the ill energies, until he was right on top of the monster that was consuming his family.  He knew why his father had discouraged him from using his talent. He knew why there had been no healers, no plant mages, in generations.

He dumped the mint seeds on the ground and spread them, like Alex would have, with a breath of wind.  He opened a pocket hole from the koi pond in the top of the tallest tower, soaking his seeds, and then he knelt.

He drew a circle, leaving a glowing line in the air.

A plant mage would have known what was happening.

They tried to stop him from stopping it.

It had tried to stop him.

A mage cannot deny who they are.

Even if they must leave their home to embrace it.

Nico drew the runes he remembered from his grandmother’s grimoire.  He understood, now, and the writing that had swirled before his eyes came back to him, still and clear.

He stepped into the circle and pushed one of the runes as if he was pushing a stone across a table.

The mint put down roots.  It sprouted in an instant, and it grew as only mint could grow.

He had always been fascinated by it.  Collected huge amounts of it. Because he had always understood, unconsciously, that this was what he was meant to do with it.

The mint, impelled by power to follow it’s nature, spread across the open space.  It encroached on the towers. It’s roots reached out and tangled around the little filament roots of the tower creature, cutting off it’s supply of nutrients from the soil.  And somehow, the plants, themselves, began to filter the sickly influence from the energy streams of the mages, standing loosely in the now waist high mint, where before had been the forecourt of the towers.

The mint surrounded Colin and his flame grew stronger.  The roots of the tower he was struggling against grew weaker.  The mint roots reached into the places Valentino’s stone had cut into the stem and began to split and break the stem, growing stronger and deeper, until they severed it entirely.

The tower seemed to wilt.  It retained its shape, but like cut grass in the sun, it was clear the life had gone from it.

Colin surged to the next tower, bellowing his rage against it as well, and Valentino turned his flagging energies to it.

“Valentino, cut into the body, just below where I seeded the ground.  The roots take hold where you have cut. Cut the body!” Nico called.

Valentino nodded, he took deep breaths and began to draw more stones out of the deep earth.

Mages from the Tower that had been cut off were coming awake, now.  Nico called directions to them. Weather mages called frost onto the woody bodies of the towers.  Fire mages burned them. Wind mages picked up grit from the hillside and sandblasted them.

He could not deny, now, that the mages of the Seven Towers were weaker than even the weakest of the mages of Valentino’s traveling folk.  He would have given anything for a blast of flame like Marc had leveled at a rampaging oliphaunt on their journey. The mages here produced fireballs barely larger than a campstove.  Colin made a bigger flame when he laughed.

The next Tower he directed their attention at was his own.

His heart jumped when Lewis sprinted out, staring around him in confusion.

His brother did not let himself be left out for long.

He joined Nico, drawing his own runic circle.

Nico did not know what to expect.

It was not two metallic clangs.

Lewis grinned wickedly and sketched quick runes.

His circle changed, wrapping around his wrists like bracers, a rune clasped in each of his hands.  He clapped his hands together and the two milky glass collars stood on end. Creatures manifested within them, like Nico had never seen.

Then he realized they were Cocoa and Roscoe, in Lewis’ favorite form, but their muzzles were not smashed in, they were of a regular length.  Which gave them a tremendous biting surface. “Mastiffs!” Lewis cackled. “Jorge told me about them!”

The creatures stood, even taller than ponies.

They turned to look at Lewis.  

“Ooojha goood woobersen?” He trilled.

The dogs wagged like they would shake themselves apart.

He pointed at the towers.

“Gogedum!” He said.

The dogs turned and ran up the side of the nearest tower, until they were standing on top, looking down at him with their doggy grins.

“Do your business,” He screamed, like he was extremely impatient, "Business, business, business!"

Both dogs lifted their legs.

The mages who had been doing their best to destroy the tower screamed and ran as a flood of caustic, steaming liquid poured down the edges.  The Tower went even paler. The wheat color of the stone hadn’t seemed unhealthy, but this did. It became brittle and let out a subtle cracking noise as it cooled.

The dogs jumped down and paced Lewis as he walked to the place above the center bulb.  He knelt and patted the ground with a hand glowing with runes. “Dig! Diget, Digetub!”

The dogs front paws flew, showering more mages with dirt.  The mint grew down the edges of the turned soil almost as fast as the unnatural beasts could dig.

As each Tower died, more mages were freed and joined them.

Valentino had settled to the ground, panting beside Nico, and Colin, rasping and producing nothing more substantial than smoke, was kneeling beside him, holding him up.  

As each of the Towers died, the mint grew thicker and deeper.

“Lewis,” Nico called, “I’m a little occupied here, I need you to get everything out of my bag in the wagon.”

Lewis nodded, opening a pocket hole, and moving the hole upwards, so the stack of jars was left standing on the grass.

“Open a hole into the bulb, and pour them in,” Nico told him, adding another circle layered with runes.  “You, Esteban, I need some water over here, can you and Lance make it rain?”

The mages had been growing progressively stronger, or perhaps been inspired to reach beyond themselves, by what they had seen the travelers do.

The two boys moved in synchronistic motions and a small dark cloud formed in the sky.  They pointed and it produced a narrow, but torrential fall of rain.

It fell directly into the hole where Lewis was pouring 5 more jars of mint seeds.

The rain eased and then stopped as the cloud spent itself and dissolved, leaving both boys stumbling and jibbering.  They hugged in triumph and fell to the ground beside one of the ruined towers.

Lewis closed the hole.

Nico sprouted 5 pounds of mint in the heart of their enemy.

Invasive, unstoppable roots tore the heart of the Seven Towers, sending shoots towards the sky.

“Get out of the way!”  Nico shouted. Lewis dove back, and Nico and Colin dragged Valentino away.

A sprout the size of Nico’s forearm burst from the ground, scything into the air at least 2 meters high.  A hundred more burst up after it.

Dozens of them pierced the still digging dogs, spiking through them in an instant.  The dogs each gave one confused bark and vanished into smoke. 

"Oops," Nico said, as the shoots grew through the now empty collars, high into the sky.

A 5 meter circle around where Nico had been standing grew a forest of impossible mint in a moment.

Then there was no sound but the wind.

Valentino reached up and thumped Nico on the shoulder.  “I knew you could do it, Magus.”

He fell back with a laugh and drummed his heels in delight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A) This is good  
> B) I am interested  
> C) What happens now?  
> D) I don't get it  
> E) I don't care


	30. Chapter 30

**Chapter 30**

  
  


“I’m going to stay here,” Tatiana said.

“They don’t know more than you do,” Nico told her.

“But I can help them remember how to learn,” She said, “And I am tired of…” She looked away, and he saw the memories of Marc in her eyes.  “Never knowing where I am going to be.”

He smiled and patted her on the shoulder.

He missed Marc, too.

His sense of humor, his kindness, his fun.

And he would have saved them a lot of the work of unrooting and burning the Seven Towers.

At least the fires kept the homeless mages warm over the winter.

Their belongings had mostly been rescued from the withered towers, though some of the magical objects had been consumed in the bulb’s last attempt to convince the mages to stop using their magics against it.

Nico was fascinated to learn that the spell to keep the grimoires unreadable had been his father’s unconscious attempt to keep the mages from using more power than they absolutely had to.  The more the mages had used their Talents, the faster the Seven Towers had consumed them. They had all been blinded to the truth of what was happening, their entrapment partly due to contentedness.  But deep inside himself, Mika had been rebelling.

The more powerful the casting a mage took on, the more likely they were to be attracted to the “atmosphere of knowledge” that was the sweet smell the plant used to trap its victims.  That was what had drawn Lewis’ mother across the world to join them.

In her own land she had been one of the most powerful mages to ever live.

Here, she had been reduced to providing a slow trickle of power, to sustain the Seven Towers for as long as possible.

Now that the mages were free, they were recovering quickly.  Like Nico and Lewis had, once they had the connection broken by Dani’s catsbane the year before.

The same potion that had kept Nico and Valentino clear headed, even as they used their Talents in the very midst of the creature’s influence.  While Lewis and Colin had specifically not partaken, so Nico’s magesight could track them when they were taken in.

The magics the two had been working brazenly for the days as they approached had primed them to be trapped by the plant.

Nico still hated that they’d had to practically drive them away to get them to give in.

Colin kept apologizing to Valentino.  “I knew it was a lie, but I WANTED it to be true.  I just wanted everything to be alright. I really believed if I went with them, I would be able to gather my strength and break out.”  He held his hands out and let them flop to his sides.

“Like a mouse resting in the juice of the honeypitcher plant, thinking it will gather its strength,” Valentino said.  “It was expected. I did not believe you betrayed me.” He smiled at his friend. “Not for an instant.”

The mages would rebuild their center of knowledge.  Now the grimoires were open and they could learn more than their own particular specialty.  Some, who had not intended to live there, but had been drawn in, were preparing to return to their homes.

Lewis’ mother had decided to stay.

Lewis and Nico had not.  They were going to go with Valentino.

They still had a promise to keep.

To friends a long way away.


	31. Chapter 31

**Epilogue**

  
  


They stood on the edge of the round valley.

It was a very different place.

The fire molasses was running in a steady torrent down the old streambed, now, into a lake of fire where the stream had stopped.  The trees had all burned to ash long ago.

The geyser of fire was still silent and heatless, but the lava, Valentino called it, had destroyed any chance of plantlife.

They left the caravan at the last terrace and the 4 of them had gone on foot.

“Don’t drop anyone in the lake this time,” Colin said to Lewis.

Valentino laughed.  He drew a circle on the ground.  Using this, he called the stone circle, the manifold, a word meaning many uses, up to meet them again.  This time it touched the broken edge of the road as delicately as a kitten.

They stood and Lewis studied his feet while it carried them, in a rush of wind, gently to the ground.

The slope was bare where the grass used to be.  The spring rains had washed the unanchored soil down in great runnels and sloughs.  The climb was no easy stroll any longer.

They came to the blind hill where the rock outcrop stood out from the rushing flame of Marc’s memorial.

Valentino and his fellows stood and waited.

Nico was incredibly aware of the rising light of the spring equinox dawn.

The light rose.

Nothing happened.

“Should we…” Lewis started.

Valentino raised a hand to silence him.

Two sword blades thrust through the face of the stone.  They each cut down and around, cutting a single arched doorway, which opened onto a blasted land, as scorched as the one where they stood.

Three men stepped through.

One pitched something grey pale and round to the ground before Valentino’s feet.  Something with a silently screaming mouth, pointed ears, and long black hair, gone flat in death.

The man in the tented, overlapping squares of armor, knelt, laying his sword on the ground before him.  He had lost his helmet somewhere, and his cheek was scared below the eye.

The other man still had his horse mane helmet.  He dropped to one knee, sword point to the ground and his hands folded on the pommel.  He had gained more armor. Now both arms were coated in plate. He was missing 3 fingers on the left hand.

Between them strode a broad shouldered, proud mage, wearing pants and an unlaced scarlet vest.  There was ash smudged over him. His hands were bound like a fist fighter in what appeared to have been white cloth, as shimmering and iridescent as spiderweb.

“I brought your warriors home, Valentino,” Marc said.

Dani and Jorge stayed unmoving, but Nico was certain their eyes had twitched to him when he said this.

“What do you have to say for yourself, Marc?” Valentino asked.

“How is my brother?”

“He is strong.  What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I am not swearing fealty to you.”

“I don’t ask for tithe or fealty, just respect.”

Marc turned to look at the burning landscape he had been brought free of.

His bare back was scored with badly healed lash marks.

Nowhere near as many as Valentino’s carried.

He turned back and his eyes were wet.

“You were a hundred and fifty years in that hell?” He asked.

“Yes,” Valentino answered.

Marc, moving like he ached in a thousand places, got down on one knee, and then lowered himself onto the other knee as well.  He put his hands palm down on the earth. “Please let me come back to my family. You have my undying respect, Magus...Valentino.”

He was greeted with silence.

Marc shifted uncomfortably, then said, “I will give the grimoires back.”

“No,” Valentino told him.  “You will carry them. You will teach the contents of them to those who wish to learn.  This will be your retribution. And the first student I have for you will challenge you.  As fast as you can, you will have to learn to keep ahead of him.”

“I know more about fire than any mage, I didn't even NEED my talent to burn that place to the ground.”

“But for me,” Colin said, “Fire is as natural as breathing.”

“You want me to turn HIM into a mage?” Marc asked in consternation.

“I think he has the right to prove that he is our equal,” Valentino answered.  “Do you think you cannot teach him?”

Marc looked the fire breather up and down.  “I am probably the only one who can keep ahead of him.”  He leaned close with a narrow eyed expression. “I have wondered what kind of secrets you kept to yourself about fire, and now I will learn what you have to share.”

Valentino leaned down and picked him up.  “You know, Marc, all of what I have done was to protect my people.  You did not like some of it, but never was any of it meant as harm.”

Nico nodded to himself.  He had seen this true over the year he had known the dark, mysterious mage called Valentino.  The price he asked was high, but the reward was beyond imagining.

“Let’s get out of here,” Lewis said.  He opened a portal to the top of the cliff.  They all stepped through it, greeting each other as lost brothers.

As they walked away the fire of Marc’s memorial flickered and died.

In the great hole left behind, a seed sprouted, and a jagged leafed plant began to grow.

  
  


**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. I really hope you liked it.
> 
> Please feel free to leave any combination of numbers and letters, as you have seen from these notes throughout the story I am open to comments both positive and negative. If there was anything you didn't understand, please help me improve the story by telling me what it was so I can explain more clearly.
> 
> If you just have a letter, that is a welcome response as well.
> 
> Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the story.
> 
> A) Good Job  
> B) It was okay  
> C) Dumb  
> D) I didn't understand everything  
> E) Where did Marc, Dani and Jorge GO?  
> F) Was there ever really a dragon?  
> (E and F- Arcadia, the land of the elves, and no, there was never a dragon)

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment.
> 
> If you are having a hard time thinking what to say, please consider the following (feel free to leave your letter of choice.)
> 
> A) I like this  
> B) This is awesome  
> C) What will happen next?  
> D) I didn't think this was interesting.


End file.
